Google AdWords Ad Customizers Rolling Out: Dynamic Insertion On Steroids

To those arguing that Google has been steadily dumbing-down AdWords and taking controls away, the company is responding with what it’s calling Tools for the Power User. The first tool to come out of the box are ad customizers, designed to help advertisers optimize ad creatives at scale.

Ad customizers are a set of parameters that allow ad copy to be updated dynamically in real-time. They’re like Dynamic Keyword Insertion on steroids: powered by a data feed with multiple parameter options for customizing ads on the fly. They’ve been available to select users via the API since August, and are now officially rolling out of beta in the AdWords interface globally over the next few weeks.

For advertisers managing huge volume of ads, ad customizers can be especially helpful for managing product variations, pricing adjustments and promotions at scale. Maybe you’ve been using the countdown script in AdWords. Now ad customizers can also power event countdowns, as you’ll see in the example below.

Here are a Google-provided suggestions for using ad customizers:

New Business Data Section In Shared Library

A new Business Data section is becoming available in the Shared library in AdWords (ad extension data will also be housed here). This is where advertisers upload the ad customizer data template with targeting attributes and information on device preference, scheduling, product detail, price, event timing or any custom text that you define to pull into the ads. When creating ads, you’ll include the ad customizer parameters you want to use for dynamic copy insertion.

For reporting purposes, the dynamic insertions don’t reset an ad’s performance data, in the same way that Dynamic Keyword Insertion doesn’t.

Ad customizers work for any text ad on the Search or Display Network, but cannot be used in the URL fields.

For more details on using ad customizers, see the help center page.

Google says more power tools to “help our most sophisticated advertisers reach customers at scale, reduce account complexity, and act on data and insights” will be rolling out over the next few months.