What Are Ad Customisers & How Can They Help My Paid Search Campaigns?

Ad customisers allow digital marketers to dynamically insert information about their business into their search ads from feeds stored within the Google Ads interface. This could be anything from prices to sales dates or any other relevant dimension which you want to regularly callout in your ads.  This guide will look at how you can create your own ad customisers and highlights a few applications for a fictional account.

 

It may be often overlooked, but under the Business Data tab of your Google Ads account you can find the Ad Extension feeds. Whenever you create a new ad extension, it will be added to these feeds, and stored in a way which makes it easy for Google to show the extensions when they are eligible.

You can access the Business Data Feeds section under Tools & Settings > Setup > Business Data within your Google Ads account.

In a similar way, Google allows you to create an Ad Customiser feed. Here, you can include information about your business which you can then refer to in your ads. Google allows you to associate this information with 4 targets from your account: keywords, ad groups, campaigns or locations.

This could be prices, store names, sale dates and much more. There is no limit to the amount of custom attributes you can create in a feed. You can create whole headlines and descriptions which can then be dynamically called into your ads when a targeting criteria is met. Attributes can be updated in real time and once approved, they can begin to show in your ads.

How to create an ad customiser feed

To help get you started…I have created an Ad Customiser Template for a fictional gym franchise with multiple locations. Copy the sheet and add in your own data.

How to use ad customisers

To call the data stored in your feed to your ads, you need to open a curly bracket { in the ad copy and select the Ad Customisers option. You can then select your feed and the attribute which you wish to call. You can call multiple attributes in the same text ad.

 

 

Below you can see the ad copy and the resulting ads for our fictional gym example:

 

 

 

What are the benefits of using ad customisers

There are several benefits of using ad customisers…Below I have outlined example applications of Location Ad Customisers at each targetable level; Keywords, Ad Groups and Locations.

Application 1: Keywords

• A broad Ad Group with multiple keywords related to a product.
• • Benefits:
    • Less admin compared with creating ad groups at a more granular level.
    • Greater creative freedom compared with Dynamic Keyword Insertion.

Application 2: Ad Groups

• A campaign with one ad group per product.
• • Benefits:
    • Product details can be stored within the feed as attributes. This could be anything from the price, special features or sale dates. They are then associated with a Target Ad Group (or Campaign) to be called in to our ads.

Application 3: Location

• Brand with multiple physical locations
• • Benefits:
    • Customise ads based on the location of the user to show hyper local ad copy without having to create a separate campaign for each store.

 

Summary

Ad customizers enable you to create hyper personalised ads, based on the keyword triggered or location of the user, without having to create an overcomplicated and often redundant account structure, saving you time in optimisation and ad creation.

 

You can find a list of all Locations available worldwide on Google’s Geotargets page:

Geotargets | AdWords API

Google also has their own Ad Customiser resource page where you can find their template and even more details on creating ad customisers.

 

Thank you for reading the latest in the ROAST Resources series, why not read The Ultimate Guide to Google’s New Partner Status Requirements…