Tailoring your ads to match your audience: the benefits of ad customisers

A key part of running any paid search campaign is ensuring that your ads are as relevant as they can be, matching the intent behind a user’s search as closely as possible. One way to easily achieve this is through ad customisers, letting you match your ads to your audience’s searches quickly and efficiently.

Ad customisers are a feature that allows you to tailor your ads to what someone is searching for. Feed-based ad customisers are based on a data set you’ll create, they specialise your ads to a wide variety of parameters, including a customer’s location, sale pricing, and keywords used in a customer’s search, to name a few.

Let’s use a pricing example:

Imagine your business offers a global service, and as result you’re running ads targeting several locations worldwide. You’ve included localised pricing on your website so that customers see your product price in their local currency, but you also want to call out your prices in your ads.

Now you could split out your campaigns by location or currency, and alter the ad copy for every location with specific pricing etc, but depending on the number of locations and currencies you’re targeting, this isn’t always a viable option.

What you can do instead, is create an ad customiser that’ll show the appropriate price and currency in an ad, based on the customer’s location, allowing you to bulk upload ad copy without having to worry if you’ve definitely got the right currency in the right campaign. Not only that, but as your customiser runs from a dataset, you’ll easily be able to update any pricing changes that happen by simply updating the dataset, meaning you won’t have to edit your ad copy directly.

Getting ad customisers into your expanded text ads requires 3 main steps: creating your dataset, uploading it to Google Ads, and including a reference to this in your ads.

After deciding how you want to customise your ads, you’ll need to create a dataset that defines what attributes you want your customiser to show, and what you’ll be targeting. Now there are lots of possible combinations that you can create, and Google offers an ad customiser data template to help get you started, but we’ll stick with our pricing example from earlier.

With this example our data set would have two columns. The first column would show the Target Location our campaigns are targeting and that we want to trigger our customisers, while the second column shows the price we want the customiser to show for each target location.

Within Google Ads, you’ll need to select Business data, then click the blue plus button and select ‘Ad customiser data’. You’ll also need to name your data, ideally a short name and one that doesn’t contain any spaces, e.g. ‘ProductPrice’. (make sure this name is unique to your dataset, and hasn’t been used before).

You can include ad customisers anywhere in your ad copy, aside from in your final URL. Wherever you decide to use it, you’ll need to use the format:

{=DataSetName.AttributeName}

With our pricing example, our dataset was called ProductPrice, and our attribute column was named Price; to reference this correctly we’d need to include {=ProductPrice.Price} in our ad copy. With this you can insert your customiser into ad text wherever you want a price etc to appear. For example, ‘Prices start from {ProductPrice.Price}’ would become ‘Prices start from $100’ if the user was searching from the US.

A full guide to this setup can be found here.

Tips:

• You can also schedule your dataset to automatically update by linking your data sheet directly with Google Ads once you’ve uploaded it.
• Also note that you can’t pause ad customisers, you can only pause the ads and ad groups containing them.

In addition to using data feeds, there are several other quick customisation options you can easily apply to your ads, without the need for a dataset. For all below, just start typing the syntax into GoogleAds interface and the help dropdown will appear to assist.

within RSAs you don’t need a data feed to insert location, you can instead just use a location insertion to call out the location in which a user is based, on a city, state, or country level. Handy for calling out business locations, e.g. Spa near {Location(City)}.

this feature allows you to insert a timer in your headlines or descriptions that counts down to an event – a great way to add urgency, particularly around sale periods!

a really simple way to insert the keyword that triggers your ad into your ad copy, helping ensure high ad relevance and better quality scores.

last but not least, If functions allow you to insert text, based on the device or audience of a user. A particularly useful feature for targeting specific audiences, for example offering existing customers a discount, or targeting new users with a joining or first purchase offer.