There's an often-overlooked feature in Google Adwords that I've seen great results from on a number of different businesses.
When you create ad text, you can create a "countdown" ad.
As the name implies, this is a type of ad that displays a dynamic countdown clock to the viewer.
It's great for creating urgency around sales/promotions, e.g. "pre-sale pricing ends in 24hrs" or counting down to a product launch.
Here's how to do it (some of the steps I have copied from Google's own instructions)
1. Create a new ad in an ad group of your choosing.
2. Start typing a { (brace symbol)
3. Select countdown option.
4. Beside "Countdown ends," fill in the date and time when you want your countdown to end. Put your time in a 24-hour format (optional).
--> For example, if your end time is 6:30 PM on July 14, 2017, your date would be 2017/07/14, and your time would be 18:30:00.
If you don’t add a specific time, it will default to midnight (00:00:00).
5. Beside "Countdown starts," enter the number of days before your end date you want your ad to start showing. If you leave this blank, it will start showing 5 days before your end date.
--> For example, if your end time is 6:30 PM on July 14, 2017, and you want your ad to start showing 7 days before then (at 6:30 PM on July 7, 2017), you would enter "7" here.
Things To Note:
* You'll need to have enough room in your ad copy (in terms of characters) for all possible times to show without making your ad go over the character limit. Adwords will alert you to this if it's a problem.
* Countdown ads turn off automatically once the countdown is over - this can catch you out if you pause all other ads in an ad group to run the countdown as the only possible ad copy.
* You can set the countdown to work in either your Adwords account OR the user's timezone (when setting up select Account time zone to count down to your end time in your AdWords account's time zone, or select Ad viewer's time zone to count down to your end time in the ad viewer's time zone.)
Countdown ads are super powerful for brands that run sales. For example, if you run an online store and have 30% off this weekend, you can call out the discount in your ad copy and then have a dynamic countdown - "Sale Ends In X Hours"
I have seen massively increased CTR and conversion rates from the clever use of countdown ads.
As always, please comment below or message me if you need any help with this tip.
I'll probably look to create a video teaching how to use this as well.
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