Scripts for Christmas Campaigns
In this post I will be explaining the first of several scripts and useful tools that will help promote your company’s products this Christmas.
We will start with a simple tool that will put a countdown in your text ad so that you can have an ad that gives a countdown to a specified date/time. Such as, to your last time for Christmas delivery. We start with the standard text ad creation box.
Fill this in as normal until you get to the description box. This tool will only have the number of days or hours left in the count down (e.g. “3 days”) so be sure to write the other text (e.g. ‘X until sale ends’ or ‘Order in the next X for next day delivery’) that will need to go before this.
When you’re ready to put the countdown tool in, simply put a { in the box and straight away you will see a list of the different tools we can put in.
As you can see there are plenty of tools that you can put in here, but right now let’s focus on the countdown tool.
As you can see, we can now put in what date and time we want our countdown to count to. If you click on the ‘Countdown ends’ date box you will see a calendar box pop up, and you can easily select the date you want. In the next box you need to put the time you want the countdown to end at in a 24-hour format, so something like 13:00:00 not 1:00:00PM it wants you to put time in a hours:minutes:seconds format. Next, you can select how many days before the countdown end you want it to start showing. This is an optional setting so feel free to leave it blank if you want it to show it straight away.
Next, we choose which language and time zone we want the ad to use, your account’s time zone, GMT+00:00 in my case or the ad viewers time zone.
When we have it set up the way we want we click ‘Set’ and it will put it in our ad.
Here you see it has taken the information we put in the nice neat window and turned it into a rather daunting bit of syntax that Google will read and understand as what we want our countdown to say. I had already put in the “Guaranteed Xmas delivery if you order in the next“ part.
If you don’t want to use the helper to set up the countdown you can write out the syntax directly into the description box as long it’s in the format that this shows here:
Syntax: {=GLOBAL_COUNTDOWN(“yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm:ss”,”language”,daysBefore)}
Using the steps shown above you should now be able to put countdowns in your ads, and don’t worry about having an irrelevant ad when the countdown ends because it will auto pause the ad when the countdown runs out.