As paid search continues to mature as a marketing channel, advertisers are still choosing to invest more of their marketing budgets with Google. eMarketer estimates search marketing spend will grow to $204b annually over the next 5 years, firmly positioning it as the most prominent digital marketing channel across most verticals.
But as search matures, the auction becomes inherently more competitive and organizations are starting to realize decreased growth and diminishing returns in search for the first time since the channel’s inception. Because of this, detailed optimization efforts are more important than ever to ensure that you’re not overpaying in search and that you’re maximizing the returns from your investment with Google.
In recent years, search marketers have been hyper focused on layering automation and machine learning into campaign management practices in order to streamline processes and squeeze out incremental ROI. While using AI technologies such as Google Smart Bidding and Responsive Search Ads have now become standard practices for search teams, You’ll see highlighted here some interesting use cases for when to introduce personalization tactics that AI driven search techniques can’t replicate yet.
Implementing these tactics now could result in an improvement to your CTR, Quality Score and overall campaign efficiency.
Let’s start with some basics.
What is Personalization?
Personalization is a range of tactics employed by marketing or merchandising teams to customize the advertising or shopping experience to be tailored to an individual shopper. Compare this to traditional marketing efforts where a single message would be presented en masse to the entire targeted audiences. Personalization uses insights known about a shopper to deliver more relevant and timely messaging in a one-to-one experience.
So why is personalization worth focusing on? Because it works. A recent Adobe survey of 400 marketing professionals determined the average ROI from personalization efforts is over a 7:1 with 66% of respondents indicating they will be increasing investment in personalization strategies over the next 5 years.
Individual personalization strategies vary depending on the marketing channel, technology available and can change over time, but here are some examples of more popular personalization tactics currently being used in digital marketing:
- Website Personalization: Used very prominently in ecommerce, with Amazon spearheading new techniques. Amazon home pages are completely personalized to you with new product recommendations based on your previous shopping and purchasing behavior. You’ll also see personalized recommendations on individual product pages and in the shopping cart.
- Customized Emails: Basic tactics include dynamically populating CRM information into the email subject or body such as the subscriber’s name, just these tactics alone typically improve open rates 26% according to Experian. More advanced ESPs have functions to change the content of the email based on other data points you have about the customer such as gender, location or loyalty status.
- Personalized Offers: Marketers can serve custom promotional offers on site or in ads to incentivize different consumers in different ways. For example, a brand may be willing to offer a larger discount to a new or lapsed customer as a tool to optimize new customer acquisition.
- Display Retargeting: Dynamic ad units in display or social media that advertise content based on previous website browsing activity would fall into the personalized advertising category. 41% of display ad spend was allocated to retargeting tactics in 2018.
- Personalized Search Ads: Paid search ads can also be personalized based on several attributes either the advertiser or Google know about the searcher including the users location or previous shopping behavior.
Going Deeper on Search
While user customized emails or site content are typically the most recognizable form of digital personalization, there are a handful of features within the Google Ads ecosystem that enable ad copy personalization that when used effectively, can result in a significant increase to CTR and performance.
Search ad copy has typically been optimized around the individual keywords targeted within an ad group. Historical best practices have been to create very granular themes of keywords and ad groups, and create / test ad copy variations tailored specifically for those keyword themes. With the introduction of Responsive Search Ads, Google AI has taken over some of the testing responsibilities for copy. But whether you are using Expanded Text Ads or Responsive search ads, ad copy has always been centered around the keyword.
While those best practices still apply and are important for optimizing quality score. Leveraging features in Google Ads to create copy that is both tailored to the keyword and user is ideal. I’ll be highlighting 2 features available to use today for user personalization of search ad copy: Geo & Audience Ad Customizers.
What is a Geo Ad Customizer?
A geo ad customizer references a feed of location data submitted to your Google Ads account to dynamically populate personalized ad copy into an ETA search ad format based on the searchers physical location or location of interest. This has utility for advertisers that have different offers / prices by region, or simply want to appear more personalized to the searcher. Below are 2 examples of search ads customized with location data:
Historically in order to accomplish this, you would have had to create a separate campaign for each location you’d be interested in creating customized copy for and change your location targeting setting for each, which would be tedious to manage at scale. Also, if the copy you wanted to associate to each location changed often (think shipping times, or lowest price), then managing this at the campaign level several times a day would not be feasible. Using a feed and customizers allows you to more easily manage this type of process.
In order to create a geo ad customizer, you need to create a feed file containing the location targeting attributes with the associated ad customizer attributes. Below is an example of what that could look like:
Here are the official Google specifications on the feed file creation. To download a list of all targetable locations via a feed, visit the Google developer documentation here. Once that feed is created, upload the file as “Ad customer data” within the Business Data section of Google Ads. If the data in your feed needs to be regularly updated, your feed can be updated once every 6 hours from an SFTP or HTTPS file location. This is managed under the “Schedules” settings for your ad customizer feed in Google Ads.
Once your feed has been uploaded in Google, it will take some time to become approved and available to use for ad copy. An approved feed will look similar to the following:
To then reference the feed and location attributes in ad copy, use the following syntax in either the headlines or description lines when creating the ad: {=FeedFileName.LocationAttribute}. Google Ads will automatically populate your available attributes from the feed once you start writing the customizer. Below is an example of what a standard branded ad set up would look like, compared to one that’s been customized by geo.
| Google Ads | Google Search |
| Headline 1: Marriott® Hotels Headline 2: Official Site Description 1: Travel with peace of mind thanks to our Commitment to Clean Standards. Description 2: Your getaway is just a drive away, find your staycation. |
Default Text Ad |
| Headline 1: Marriott® Hotels Headline 2: Book Your Stay in {=SampleGeoFeed.LocationState} Description 1: Travel with peace of mind to {=SampleGeoFeed.LocationCity) with rooms starting at {=SampleGeoFeed.LowestRoomPrice). Description 2: Your getaware is just a drive away, find your staycation |
Geo-Customized Text Ad  |
If executed well, geo-customized ad copy can provide a significant increase in performance. One advertiser experienced a 30% increase in CTR and a 50% decrease in CPA. When you’re using geo-customized ads in active campaigns, we’d recommend you combine them when non-customized ETA or RSA variants in your ad groups so a backup ad is available to serve if the searchers location isn’t currently targeted within your feed.
Audience Customizers
While geo ad customizers can be a useful personalization tactic, if an advertiser doesn’t have disparate offers or products by location, then they won’t have the ability to take advantage of this feature. A separate personalization option is to create ad copy that’s been personalized using an audience customizer. This allows an advertiser to adjust their ad copy if the searcher falls within a particular audience in the account, such as an RLSA, Customer Match or Similar Audience. This feature allows for very detailed ad copy personalization with creative tailored to a particular audience. Examples of ad copy using this feature could include the following:
- Offering a larger discount to a Cart Abandoners audience (Google Source):
| Google Ads | Google Search |
| Headline 1: Kids Basketball Shoes Headline 2: Save {=IF(audience IN(Cart Abandoners),30%):20%} on Top Brands Headline 3: Family-Owned Business Description: Get The Best Shoes At The Best Price. Free Shipping. Buy Now! |
Audience = cart abandoners  |
- Offering an incentive for new customers only:
| Google Ads | Google Search |
| Headline 1: Enterprise Rent-A-Car® Headline 2: {=IF(audience IN(All Converters),When You’re Ready, We’re Ready):New Renters Enjoy 15% Off} Description 1: We’re open at neighborhood & airport locations with modified service options for safety Description 1: Reserve a car directly with Enterprise® today to save time & money on your trip. |
Audience = All Converters We’re open at neighborhood & airport locations with modified service options for safety. Reserve a car directly with Enterprise® today to save time & money on your trip. |
- Tailoring an offer to be customized to an Adara search segment:
| Google Ads | Google Search |
| Headline 1: Hyatt® Official Site Headline 2: {=IF(audience IN(Adara_Elite_Tier),Join Word of Hyatt Rewards):Safety First, Wellbeing Always} Description 1: {=IF(audience IN(Adara_Elite_Tier),10 Qualifying Night Credits Toward Tier Status & 50,000 Bonus Points After Account Opening):We’re Ready to Welcome You Back When You’re Ready to Travel.} Description 1: Learn More About Hyatt’s Global Care & Cleanliness Commitment. |
Audience = Adara_Elite_Tier  |
Adara currently offers 90+ proprietary segments for Search across the travel, finance and retail verticals which can be used for your ad copy personalization and bid optimization efforts. If you’re interested in demoing Adara Search, please click here.
In conclusion, leveraging either geo or audience customizers in your search ad copy can be an effective way to appeal to your target customer and differentiate from your competition. We’d encourage you to incorporate these into your current ad copy optimization strategy for search.
About the Author
Randy Stark
Sales Engineer (SEM), Adara