- Starting June 30, 2022, you’ll no longer be able to create or edit ad customizers for expanded text ads as the creation of new expanded text ads will no longer be supported.
- You’ll also no longer be able to upload or edit the business data for expanded text ads.
- Existing ad customizers for expanded text ads will continue to serve until May 31, 2024.
- We strongly encourage you to transition to responsive search ads.
- Learn more about Making it easier to show the right message on Search.
Ad customizers allow you to automatically customize the text of your search ads. You can adapt your ad text based on keywords.
This article explains the benefits of ad customizers and how they work.
Benefits
- Tailored messaging: Ads are hyper-specialized to each search or web page 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 text customization 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, you’ll first add details for your customizer in your business data. These details can be uploaded from a spreadsheet or added manually.
You’ll 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 responsive search ads and text ads.
When to use customizers
When you use customizers, they give people confidence that you have what they're looking for, and 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 (such as 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.
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 that he's offering.
Ad customizers let him offer these details for all his mixers, with only one ad. With responsive search ads, first he needs to create the customizers by defining the attributes which can then be used across his account. Then all he needs to do is to upload ad customizer data with the details associated with each mixer. A line from this ad customizer spreadsheet might look like this:
| Keyword | Customizer: Model | Customizer: Capacity | Customizer: Type | Customizer: Start_price | Customizer: Sale_ends |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| prowhip 300 | ProWhip 300 | 5 | tilt-head | $199 USD | 2015/05/15 20:00:00 |
The "Keyword" column shows what keyword should trigger the details in the other columns.
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:
ProWhip 300 Stand Mixer
Ad www.example.com
5 quart tilt-head stand mixer.
$199 USD - 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), and 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 (for example, 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:
| Campaign | Ad group | Customizer: Brand | Customizer: Num_models | Customizer: Start_price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stand Mixers | ProWhip | ProWhip | 9 | $150 USD |
He 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:
ProWhip Stand Mixers
Ad www.example.com
9 models to choose from.
Starts as low as $150 USD.
