According to various calculations, up to 90% of users have “banner blindness” — that is, they ignore advertising on the Internet. But the problem with banner blindness is not how to advertise, but what kind. Does anyone scroll through the announcement of the performance of their favorite band, only because of the note “advertisement” above the poster? Will the banner with the desired book at a discount not catch the eye, even in the obsessive pop-up? Banner blindness does not exist when it comes to important audience things. In this article, Head of Media Planning & Strategy, newage. Maksym Tereshchenko will tell how dynamic creatives help to reach the audience and how we launch them in Google Studio.
Studio (Google Studio, Creative Studio) is a professional resource for advertisers, where you can create and save dynamic creatives.
How Dynamic Creatives Work In Studio
Dynamic data-driven creatives are graphic ads that change their appearance according to the rules set by the advertiser.
When it comes to dynamic creatives, ad personalization immediately comes to mind. Depending on the characteristics of the audience, you can prepare options for how the banner will change for specific users, without the need to physically prepare different banners.
For example, a pet store serves food for any pets: from spiders to capybaras. With standard solutions, the store would have to create separate banners with a full set of resizes for all the feeds in stock. Sounds like hundreds of hours of designer work, right? And with dynamic creatives, it is enough to make a banner template and upload photos of products that will be seen by the owners of cats, dogs, and snakes – depending on which animal Google recognized you. At the same time, resizes are also implemented according to automatic rules, so it is up to the designer to set and check these rules.
And while this automated personalization itself saves time, it’s only the basic level of using dynamic creatives and Google Studio. You can change anything in the image depending on anything, if only you had the data and the appropriate strategy.
NB! Make sure that the dynamism of the creatives does not discriminate against the segments of your audience. At the very least, it’s against Google’s advertiser policy. That is, offering the same sneakers more expensively to iPhone users than to Xiaomi owners is a bad idea. But showing them covers for the corresponding equipment is a completely logical application of technology.
We’ve talked a lot about creatives, and this is a great example of how a creative is made up of objects, and we can change those objects in dependencies.
The picture, contents, and text colors are changing
This is how a master banner prepared by a designer will look with a bit of montage magic. But, if we talk about dynamic creative and the rules for changing it, then they are built based on Google Sheets, where you can export your product feeds, and adjust combinations of objects, messages, colors, weather conditions, and many other variations. And simultaneously work with different departments: content, design, traffic, and strategist. An example of a completed feed looks like this:
Before you go to the settings in Studio, you should set up the feed, and specify in it all the possible combinations, and all the variables for building the creative. In general, everything is built on feeds. In them, you specify the entire list of objects and their options, as well as how they will change in Studio.
Fortunately, Studio has feed templates for standard solutions that you can customize. You can use Google Sheets for the feed. Write calculations and variables on separate pages and upload only one tab, which will be the final version of the feed.
So let’s consider non-standard examples of using dynamic creatives.
If you need effective creatives for your campaign, write “I need banners” to info@newage.agency. Or leave your contacts on the “Design” page.
How To Use Data-Driven Creatives With Google Studio
There are many scenarios in which dynamic creatives can be used, but among them, there is a certain list of standard solutions. Google includes the following solutions.
- Depending on geotargeting (region, country). Allows you to personalize ads for residents of different regions, or, for example, scale successful creatives from one country to another.
- Depending on the time indicators. For example, your creative can realistically calculate the days until the end of the promotion or before the start of the event.
- Promotion of certain products, depending on audience preferences based on media signals from the advertising network.
- Using A/B testing so that the system automatically detects the most effective creative elements and optimizes them.
There are also certain custom solutions that are available only in Studio among the Google tools.
The first possibility is the use of dynamic remarketing. For example, if users viewed products in the range of up to 100 euros, and you upsell them with the corresponding products. Or you can personalize the ad depending on the visited section and time. At the next contact, one or another creative will be generated where you will show the data set you want to use.
But the main advantage of custom solutions is the ability to add your own data and your own feeds.
For example, an online store, using dynamic creatives, can simply indicate the price of goods on the banner. And in the case of a price change, do not redraw the banner (with all resizes, this is important), but only change the data in the file that Studio focuses on — anyone can do this when they understand the principle of operation, not only designers or analysts.
When creating your own feeds, you are not limited to using data from your own CRM, you can use any data: from the rate of a certain currency to the level of the hurricane threat — if only this data could be received in realtime via API. The question remains just: “How to use this data in the communication strategy?” Next, let’s look at an example of how to create weather-related advertising, such as this one.
Interesting fact: in Campaign Manager, you can set up creative display scenarios to nest ads in a single story to make the best use of different formats. Read about it in the article Campaign Manager Features: Creative Rotation
How To Create A Dynamic Creative In Google Studio
We Are Preparing A Feed With The Rules For Changing Creatives
The work begins with the creation of a creative strategy. Think in detail about what, to whom, and how you want to show; under what conditions, and in what manner. Think about how you can personalize your message for your audience. You can appeal separately to men and women, to young people and older people, so you can appeal to the interests of audiences. For example, we will create a creative that will change with the weather.
Weather is not a built-in solution in Google Studio, so to take it into account, we created a Trigger sheet that pulls weather information for certain cities (we used a script from Google that pulls data from the weather server).
We set variations of creatives on the Feed sheet and specify what exactly will be displayed under certain conditions. Weather information is pulled here automatically from the Trigger sheet using simple formulas. Here you can add the rules for interpreting weather data — what percentage of cloudiness will indicate clear weather, or how to recognize rain or snow from the wording of “precipitation”.
Accordingly, we have created rules according to which the creative will change, depending on the current weather in the regional centers. We have three conditions (sunny, rain, snow), and an additional condition — the viewer’s geolocation.
Also, pay attention to the Default column in the feed — you should not skip it when you customize the feed to your needs. If Studio cannot determine the replacement rules for a specific user, it will show him either a white square or a creative option from the Default column. We recommend that you don’t waste your budget on displaying white squares, and still prepare a basic message for the default banner, or take into account situations that make it impossible not to meet your conditions (it’s difficult but real).
We Create A Studio Profile
When the feed is ready, you can go to the settings in Google Studio.
First, you need to have an advertiser created and linked to CM360. And for each advertiser, its own Dynamic Content is created, that is, an object where all your profiles with corresponding feeds will be stored in the future.
When creating a profile in the interface, we see 7 steps, each of which requires certain actions. The interface is intuitive, first, you set a name and, optionally, a description of the campaign, and upload a Google Sheet with a feed.
NB! In order for Studio to have access to the feed, it is necessary to assign access to them to the mail specified in the interface. Otherwise, your spreadsheet will not be displayed.
Next, you choose the data types and configure your feed so that Studio can understand and identify, depending on the data type, the data in your feed — you need to tell Studio what each column in your table is responsible for.
Next comes auto filtering and prioritized rules. Here you can set the order in which the principles of changing the ad will be applied. Our experimental weather creative varies based on the weather in the display region. We need that, before showing the creative, the system first looks at geotargeting, and only then at the column with the weather — this sequence, if necessary, is prescribed in the third step of setting up the campaign.
The next step is creative code generation. Here you can take the generated code based on the rules and add it to your HTML, then upload the updated HTML code to Studio, and then check it. Or use Google Web Design with links to certain objects (account, advertisement, profile, and campaign). We usually use GWD because it’s easy to set up the dynamic binding of web objects to the columns of the finished feed and immediately check the rendering of the creative. And also here is the binding of your advertiser to the profile of the advertiser.
After uploading the banner, a preview will be available to you where you can check the changes to the banner. You can also save preview sheets (Preview Sheets) of this or that combination to share with other members of your team or the client.
Next, you can specify up to 8 dimensions that you can see in Campaign Manager reporting.
And the last stage is publication. When you publish a profile, you can make a publication, actually, a creative — transfer it to Google Ads or DV360. But we first transfer the creative to Campaign Manager 360 to track the delayed effects of advertising using the Comprehensive Analysis methodology.
How Much Does Creative Studio Cost?
Google Creative is a free tool, but, if you want to investigate the real effectiveness of dynamic creatives with the help of Campaign Manager, you will have to pay for tracking depending on their conditions with resellers. This cost for resellers usually does not depend on the subject of the ad or the niche in which you work, so for niches with a high-margin product and a long customer journey, this is a must-have. Especially considering the possibilities that personalized creatives open up.
If the issue of creative for advertising is relevant for you, read our article “How do you know which creative works best? Test.”
Conclusion: Why You Should Try Dynamic Creatives In Google Studio
- Dynamic creatives automate the designer’s work. What is more, the monotonous mechanical part of the work is cut — the reproduction of creatives and resizes with different messages for different audiences. If you order creatives from a contractor, Studio will save you money; if you do advertising with the help of your own team, you can redirect the freed time to more priority tasks than repeating “Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+S, Ctrl+Z”.
- New communication strategies. In the backlog of any marketing department are ideas that cannot be implemented due to a lack of resources. If you’ve already optimized the resource needed to generate 1,000 creatives, what’s stopping you from launching that dream 1,000 creative campaigns?
- Personalized ads work better than standardized ones. We will talk about this in future cases with Google Studio. While we are preparing them, write to info@newage.agency ”I want dynamic creatives in Studio” and we will write you back to discuss your dynamic creative solutions in detail.
