Ever wanted to have time sensitive calls to action in your ad copy? Well now you can! Well actually the function in Adwords has been around for more than a year but if you’ve never considered using ad customisers now should be the time.
With 25% of online shoppers beginning their Christmas shopping before Halloween and huge festive online shopping days upon us using countdown ads can help your ad stand out from the crowd!
The premise of a countdown ad is simple; you can insert a timer into your text advert that counts down to an event.
In practice this means you can create a sense of urgency in your ads surrounding special offers. For example, if for the build up to Christmas you’re offering 20% off all products you can create an ad that informs of this and informs of how long until the offer expires. It could look like this:
The ad will then dynamically change the time left until the end of your offer each day. Once your below 1 day left on your offer the ad will even display the hours until the offer ends. This sense of urgency really helps your ads click through rate!
How to set up countdown adsÂ
Adwords have made setting up these ads really easy now. All you now have to do is write your advert as normal and where you’d like the ads to feature the countdown aspect simply key ‘{‘ and the option to use countdown or keyword insertion will appear.
Select countdown and an option box appears allowing you to select when your offer ends and how long before the end of the offer would you like the countdown to start:
Select set, check out your happy with how the ad would display on the right-hand side and adjust if necessary. Once complete save and you’re good to go!
Be conscious though, Adwords won’t let you run just a countdown advert on its own in an ad group so you will need another advert that isn’t utilising the countdown feature in the ad group as well. The way to ensure your countdown ad shows the majority of time though is to go into settings and choose the ad rotation setting ‘optimise for clicks’, which will show the ads with the highest click-through rate more often. Your countdown ad should have the higher CTR if you offer is appealing enough, if not back to the drawing board and try again.