Black Friday AdWords Countdown Feature

We got a last minute email Thursday night giving us a heads up that one of our clients would like to run a Black Friday AdWords campaign in the morning. For those people that have missed the excitement of Black Friday it is another American phenomenon that has shipped its way across to our shores. Stores (Shops if your English) create hype by offering crazy sales allowing people to save money on their Christmas Shopping.

Wanting our Black Friday AdWords campaign to stand out from our competitors we dived into our Google box of tricks and decided to add the new (ish) countdown feature to the 2nd description line of our AdWords adverts.

Guide to using the AdWords Countdown Feature – 3 Easy Steps

1. Create Your Advert: Create your Black Friday AdWords campaign as normal, thinking about how you are going to add the new countdown feature within the advertising text. e.g. “Black Friday, Up To 50% Off, 4 hours To Go”
2. Choose Your Date: Think of the date you would like the sale to finish then simply edit the text: {=COUNTDOWN(“2014/1/24 23:59:00”)} – As you can see our Black Friday AdWords campaign will be finishing on Monday the 1st Dec
3. Publish Your Advert: Add the code to your Black Friday AdWords adverts, it work’s on any element of the Advert apart from the destination URL. Text {=COUNTDOWN(“2014/1/24 23:59:00″)} Text

Limitations And Problems

The main issue I had with this feature was its lack of compatibility with AdWords Editor. I do 90% of AdWords changes using this great Google Tool, but it doesn’t (currently) recognise the COUNTDOWN tag and is restricted due to the 35 or 25 character limit. The alternative of editing multiple adverts using the web version of AdWords also creates a very similar problem flagging up the additional characters.

We left out the COUNTDOWN tag from our Black Friday AdWords campaign and then used the bulk download feature to generate a csv file that could be edited in Excel. After 2 minutes of editing we simply uploaded the amended csv file and the new COUNTDOWN Black Friday AdWords adverts were live within 10min.

Getextra are online marketing specialists and official Google partners, if you would like any advice on your own Black Friday AdWords campaign or any other aspect of Google AdWords give us a call on 01482 426242 or email adwords@Getextra.co.uk