Having an effective ad copy strategy is key to the success of any paid search campaign. Google and Bing Ads provide a robust set of basic features and guidelines to ensure that advertisers are getting the most value from their copy. However, complications can arise in certain cases. Maybe there’s a need to create brand new versions of copy with no historical data, or to message a lot of promotions in a short amount of time. For advertisers looking for a quick and agile solution to these problems and more, ad customizers are a great option.
How They Work
There are two main components to ad customizers: the feed that contains the messaging, and the ad copy itself, which calls on that feed. The first step is to upload the feed as an Excel document to the Business Data section of Google or Bing Ads. In addition to columns for each Expanded Text Ad (ETA) headline and description line, there are a number of columns that allow for advanced targeting and scheduling, such as location targeting and start/end dates. The feed can contain as many rows (versions of copy) as you want.
With the feed created and uploaded, the next step is to write ad copy using a specialized syntax that calls on the business data feed in order to populate the messaging. See an example below:
The copy will dynamically adjust to display the messaging in each row of the feed, according to the schedule set with the start/end date columns.
How Ad Customizers Add Value
Ad customizers have several advantages over standard Expanded Text Ads (ETAs):
Historical Data:
When a brand-new ETA is created, it has no historical click, impression or conversion data for Google/Bing Ads to consider. This means that it has an extremely low chance of appearing on the search engine results page (SERP) over older versions until it accumulates comparable levels of performance data. Ad customizers mitigate this problem because they allow a single ad unit to host multiple versions of copy. As an example, an advertiser might use an ad customizer feed solely for evergreen messaging several months before a holiday period. Then, by the time holiday messaging is ready to be added to the feed, the ad customizer copy will have accumulated enough data for that holiday messaging to show.
Ease of Updating:
Updating ad customizer copy is as simple as editing the desired row of the business data feed. The change will be automatically applied to every ad group that contains the copy. There is no need to manually update the copy itself or make time-consuming bulk changes in the Google Ads or Microsoft Ads Editor.
Quick Performance Views:
In addition to messaging, scheduling and targeting information, the business data feed automatically updates with performance data for each row. This makes it very easy to assess the performance of each version of messaging at a glance, rather than pulling performance data for multiple different ETAs. For advertisers running a high volume of short promotions, this capability is especially handy.
To learn more about what you can do with ad customizers, check out the Google Ads help page here.
