About ad customizers
Ad customizers allow you to automatically customize the text of your search ads. You can adapt your ad text based on keywords.
Example
You can use ad customizers to advertise limited-time offers for specific products at different locations.
Denver deals on product 1
Offer ends5/15.
Portland deals on product 2
Offer ends 6/1.
This article explains the benefits of ad customizers and how they work.
Benefits
- Tailored messaging: Ads are hyper-specialized to each search or webpage being viewed.
- Scalability: Customizers let a single text ad have hundreds of variations, and show the most relevant variation to each potential customer.
- Reporting: The automatic updates that happen when an ad is triggered don't reset the ad's performance data.
How they work
Ad customizers work like keyword insertion or countdown timers, in which you add dynamic content, directly into your ads. Customizers are available for text ads and responsive search ads. You can customize any part of your ad text, except for the URL. VisURL path customization is supported for both responsive search ads business data and location customizers, but not for responsive search ads countdown.
To set up a customizer, youll first add details for your customizer in your business data. These details can be uploaded from a spreadsheet or added manually.
Youll then specify the location in your ad text where you want the text to be customized. Add curly brackets {} with the name of your customizer into your ad text to indicate which content will be customized.
Learn more about how to create customizers for text ads and responsive search ads.
When to use customizers
When you use customizers, they give people confidence that you have what they're looking for, as well as an incentive to buy it from you.
- Running a sale? Customizers can display certain discounts with certain products, for sales that change periodically, or that are limited to a specific time period.
- Managing a large inventory? Customizers can use brand-related keywords to display specific details about the product someone's looking for. For example:
- Keyword targeting can be used to customize keyword insertion.
- Campaign and ad group targeting can be used to quickly update data according to the structure [for example, price per product if ad groups are targeted by product].
- Account targeting can be used for updating a global variable, such as current APR rates or ongoing discounts.
- Selling your products in multiple cities and regions? Customizers can use someones physical location [or the location theyre interested in] to show location-specific pricing, product availability, or calls to action.
Examples
Target by keywordUsing target keywords lets your ad include more details about what potential customers are looking for. This method tends to work well for advertisers with a large inventory whose product details are a strong selling point.
Example
Scott's kitchen supply store offers hundreds of different stand mixers. He wants his ads to show details for each model, along with the current sale price he's offering.
Ad customizers let him offer these details for all of his mixers, with only one ad. All he needs to do is upload ad customizer data with the details associated with each mixer. A line from this ad customizer spreadsheet might look like this:
Target keyword Model [text] Capacity [number] Type [text] Start_price [price] Sale_ends [date] prowhip 300 ProWhip 300 5 tilt-head $199 2015/05/15 20:00:00The "Target keyword" column shows what keyword should trigger the details in the other columns, each of which specify what type of details they include [text, number, and so on].
When Scott writes his ad, he uses customizers that reference each column in place of specific details. The first part of the customizer ["Mixers"] is the name he gave to his data set, and the second part [for example, "Model"] is the name of a column.
{=Mixers.Model} Stand Mixerwww.example.com
{=Mixers.Capacity} quart {=Mixers.Type} stand mixer.
{=Mixers.Start_price} - sale ends in {=COUNTDOWN[Mixers.Sale_ends]}.
Now, if someone searches for "buy prowhip 300" on May 10, 2015, and this ad appears, the customizers update the ad according to the "prowhip 300" keyword, like this:
$199 - sale ends in 5 days.
Scott's ad now gives people confidence that he has what they're looking for [a 5-quart tilt-head stand mixer], as well as an incentive [sale price] to buy a mixer from his store.
Example
Scott's account is organized such that each campaign is focused on one category of appliances [e.g., stand mixers, blenders, and bread machines], with one ad group per brand. He finds that when people look for a particular model, they often end up buying a different model within the same brand, so he wants to highlight his large selection for specific brands. To do this, he needs to customize his ads by ad group and use the "Target campaign" and "Target ad group" columns. Here's an example line from his ad customizer data:
Target campaign Target ad group Brand [text] Num_models [number] Start_price [price] Stand Mixers ProWhip ProWhip 9 $150He then creates an ad like this for each ad group:
{=Mixers.Brand} Stand Mixerswww.example.com
{=Mixers.Num_models} models to choose from.
Starts as low as {=Mixers.Start_price}.
Someone searching for "prowhip 300" might see his ad appear like this:
Starts as low as $150.
Related links
- Create ad customizers for text ads
- Create ad customizer for responsive search ads