Using Location Based Ad Customizers in Google Ads

Google ad customizers allow you to reference a data feed to pick what will be inserted into the ad. This could be a location or a product. They can help to simplify account structure. If you want to add locations of your store or service area to ad copy, using this ad customizer is the best way to do so that won’t force you to have multiple campaigns with duplicate keywords to have location based copy.  Learn how to start tailoring ad copy to your audience with location ad customizers.

What are Google Ad Customizers

Ad customizers are attributes that allow ad copy to change when different factors are met. Some of these factors include the user’s location, audience membership, the time of day, the device being used, and more. They allow for scalability by allowing many different variations of ads without having to create all different campaigns or ad groups.  This is helpful if you’re up against asset limits or just want to simplify account management. They allow you to call out the location that person is searching from to show that you service that area or couple products being searched with a promotion to help make the sale. There are 4 main types of ad customizers: keyword insertion, parameter, IF function, and countdown.

How to Set Up Location Ad Customizers

Parameter ad customizers can be a little tricky because it requires a feed to be set up. This Google article gives you a template of the data feed, which makes this much easier to implement. While I’m focusing on the location aspect of this type of customizer, that is not all you can do with this type. The goal of this was to insert locations based on the service area of the business based on where the user was searching, but without having to create duplicate campaigns that would be segmented by geo. 

Creating and Uploading the Feed

The feed set up was simple. Column A had the location that was to be in the ad copy. The “Target Type” is related to the “Target Location”. It could be a city, neighborhood, zip code, etc based on what the “Target Location” column referenced, and lastly, the “Target Campaign” is where the ads would live in the Google Ads account. 

Location Ad Customizer Feed Example

To find out what the target type of my location was, I went into the campaign locations as if I was going to change the targeting, and typed it in. This allowed me to see what Google classified my location as or if my location had to be targeted by zip code, like the Dormont example above. Once the feed is set up, download and save it as a .csv. Then upload it to “Business Data” under Tools and Settings. Now you’re ready to create your ads. 

Inserting Customizers into Ad Copy

Create a new ad as usual. Once you have the place in the copy where you want the location to show up, you will need to remember what the name of the column that has the location as you want it to show up in the ad (Column A in the above example), and the name of the feed you uploaded. Both of these will need to be referenced in the ad. I want my ad to read “Now Servicing Allison Park”. So in order to do this, I will reference the column and the feed where it says “Allison Park”. In the UI that copy will look like this: “Now Servicing {=location.locationfeed}”. “Locationfeed” is what I named the data feed that was uploaded and the “location” references what I named Column A in that feed. So now when someone located in Allison Park searches Google will change out my dynamic text to say “Allison Park”.

This is only a small aspect of what all you can do with ad customizers, but they are a powerful tool that allows you to increase ad relevancy to the user while not over complicating an account. 

Root and Branch Group is here to help with your PPC account and ad customizers, just contact us. Root & Branch is a digital marketing team based in Pittsburgh, PA that provides a wide variety of digital marketing and training services for B2C and B2B companies. Root & Branch is a certified Google Partner agency that focuses on paid search (PPC), SEO, Local SEO, digital reputation management, and digital analytics.