Google AdWords Ad Customisers enable you to create multiple variations of your ad to personalise the ad text to match the users search. These Customiser tools can dynamically adapt your ad text to what someone is searching for, the device they are using, the location they or in and even the date, time of day or day of the week. They can insert a price, a discount percentage, the time left before a sale ends, and any other text that you define.
The tools work by adding coding parameters to your ad text which pull information from an uploaded spreadsheet. The main features of Customisers can be broken into:
- Inventory
- Location
- Countdown
Inventory
If you have a large inventory of stock, Customisers can use brand related keywords to display specific details about the product that someone is looking for – e.g. if you sell a range of mixers and someone searches for a specific brand of mixer – you can set your ad to appear with that specific brand.
The ad text as set by your AdWords account manager would look something like this:
The highlighted text in brackets will pull data from your spreadsheet to match the specific search query.
So the ad could then appear like this below:
For example there is potentially a brand customiser at work in these Amazon ads below. Googling ‘russell hobbs mixer’ brought up:
And googling ‘smeg mixer’ brought up:
Location
If sell your products in multiple cities, Customisers can use someone’s physical location (or the location that they’re interested in) to show location-specific pricing, product availability or calls to action.
See John Lewis examples below:
Googling ‘smeg fridge Glasgow’ brings up:
Googling ‘smeg fridge Manchester’ brings up:
You can combine location info with other specifics such as sale dates, price discounts or stock levels in that store location. Over 50% of users who search for a product visit the actual store within a day – so using location customisers in this way can help your ad become a more successful ‘door to the store’.
Countdown
If you are running a sale Customisers can display certain discounts with certain products, for sales that change periodically, or that are limited to a specific time period. Combined with the inventory and location data above, it’s the feature that can help speed the change from browser to buyer.
The countdown feature allows you to dynamically countdown to an event or when a promotion ends or starts.
For example, as shown in this Samsung ad below, a line of text that says “Hurry, sale ends in ____ days!” could be filled in with the right number of days.
The feature can count down based on your account time zone, which is handy if you’re running a competition and there is a global cutoff time for submissions (e.g., the contest closes at midnight GMT, regardless of where in the world the participant is located).
Do they work?
The above is a broad overview of the main Customiser features. However, Customisers were originally released by Google in 2015 and since then they have been updated to allow for more complex variations such as the following:
- Dynamic variations of one ad type for different custom audiences (e.g. returning visitors / cart abandoners)
- Extra location features such as delivery time based on distance to the user’s physical location when searching
- Device variations – e.g. showing some ad text only if the user is searching on desktop
Reporting on performance of ad customisers to date has been very positive with results showing significant increases in Conversions, Revenue and Click Through Rate compared to standard non dynamic static ads. In the seconds it takes a person searching on Google to decide what to click on, even a small bit of customised text can make your ad stand out as the one for them.
To find out more and to see if your AdWords ads could benefit from these tools, give us a call!
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