AdWords Countdown Ads

Countdown ads change your text ads to run alongside a sale you may have on for your business, i.e. if you have a special offer on one of your products which ends at a certain time, you can “countdown” until the offer ends for your one-time event.

The main benefits of these are:

• Minimal optimisation of ad copy as Google automatically updates how long is left of the sale.
• A larger ad which makes your sale stand out from the pack.
• A really good call to action letting users know they need to act quick before the sale ends.

These countdown extensions work similar to keyword insertion as you place a text format around your keywords to automatically change when your countdown ads formula is included.

It is worth noting that these ads do require 1 ad in the ad group to not be a countdown ad and also the ads will default to start running 5 days before the sale ends.

Below is an example of how to setup AdWords countdown ads:

Red Shoes

20% off Selected Shoes.

Sale Ends in {=countdown(“yyyy/mm/dd hh:mm:ss”)}

Below is an example of countdown ads once the formula fields are filled in:

Red Shoes

20% off selected shoes.

Sale ends in {=countdown(“2015/04/11 09:00:00”)}

This effectively is setting up a countdown ads ad-group for a shoe sale ending at 9am on 11th April 2015.

It will be interesting to see how these ads perform in the near future but they should work very well for eCommerce stores and businesses with frequent sales promotions.