With less than 2 months until Black Friday, you’ve probably already started preparing your holiday sales. Lets say you’re running a great 3 day sale from Black Friday to Cyber Monday. In order to create a sense of urgency and encourage conversions, you may want your ads to show searchers a countdown of how long they have left in the sale. In the past, this would require you to log into AdWords every day of your sale and update the countdown. Luckily this burden was lifted when Google introduced ad cutomizers, which use dynamic keyword insertation to automatically update your ad. Now if the phrase “dynamic keyword insertation” sounds a little intimidating, have no fear! Google has simplified the process so you don’t have to deal with any complicated formulas. Just follow these simple steps and your ad will be set up in no time:
Step 1: Add a new ad
First, go into your account and create a new ad. Then decide where you want to place your countdown; it can be placed in any field aside from the URL. For this example, I’ll include it in my description. To activate the countdown feature simply type “{” and a drop-down menu will appear. From these options, choose “Countdown”.
Step 2: Set sale start and end dates
Next you have to choose your countdown end and start time. Using my example from before, let’s say I’m running a sale that ends on Cyber Monday at 11:59PM and starts 3 days before on Black Friday. Expand the “Advanced” drop-down and choose whether you want the countdown to be in your time zone or the ad viewer’s.
Step 3: It’s really that easy
As you can see, Google does all the work for you and fills in the formula based on the dates and timezone you put in. And that’s it! From here, you can go ahead and save your ad. Didn’t I tell you it was easy?
Ad customizers are not only great for countdowns, they can also be used to to show ads to only specific devices, audience, locations or only during certain times of the day and even more. Head over to this AdWords Help page to explore even more ways you can use ad customizers!