When setting up your Ad templates, you can choose how Channable handles changes made to your templates. The setting “when item data or ad templates change” enables you to choose to either create new ads or update your existing ads.
For example, you might want to "Update existing ads" when your headlines or descriptions change based on your feed, or when you manually add more of them. In this article, we explain how to use this option.
There are two options available:
- Create new ads and pause the outdated ads
- Update your existing ads
Option 1: Create new ads, pause outdated ads
This option will create a new ad on Google every time there is a change in your feed data or your ad template. The old ad will be paused.
When to use this option?
This option should be used if you want to keep track of the performance of each ad variation.
When not to use this option?
The downside of this option is that it may take up to 3 days for Google to approve a new ad, and you may lose revenue during this time. Besides, your ads lose the data every time they get updated which might negatively impact Google’s algorithms and might make reporting more difficult.
Option 2: Update existing ads
This option will update the existing ads on Google every time there is a change in your feed data or your ad template.
When to use this option?
This option should be used if you want to test variations of your ad and want to avoid delays in approval from Google. Also, your ads retain all the historic data.
With this option, you can start with a few headlines and then add more later. This gives you the option to test variations of headlines and descriptions as well.
Another good reason to use this option is to replace assets that are not performing well and easily update or add special promotional messages. Please note that assets are always replaced, not updated—this means the old asset is removed, and a new one is created.
Switching between the two options for existing ads on Google
If you already have ads on Google, you might want to make use of this option to update them. By default, if a generator for existing ads runs once with the setting "Create new ads, pause outdated ads" and you switch it to “Updating existing ads”, we will create new ads on Google and pause the old ones. This will happen only on the first run after you have switched between the two options. After that, the newly created ads will be updated. However, this can be avoided.
If you want to update your existing ads on Google without creating news ones, please follow the steps below:
- Switch the setting to "Update existing ads"
- Run the ads generator
- Now, adjust the ad template e.g. edit the headlines or remove some assets
- Finally, run the generator again
This way your existing ads will be updated without a new ad being created.