First Look: Google Display Ad Builder
I’ve recently taken the time to play around with Google’s Display Ad Builder, and I’ll have to say that I’m pretty impressed with the speed with which you can make a pretty decent looking display ad. It probably takes about 30 minutes to make your very first ad, with getting used to the interface, figuring out what all the naming conventions and out how to use your images and all, but after that it’s a breeze. Once you get your images cropped correctly in Photoshop (are you using something else?) all you have to do is upload it through Google’s built-in Dialog box-style uploader and put in the text you want. After you’ve used it a few times, I’d daresay you can build an ad in 5-10 minutes.
After all this, it brings up a summary page with each size variation:
300X250 & 336X280 Square
120X600 & 160X600 Skyscraper
468X60 &728X90 Banners
They might not all look too good in every size. Maybe the text gets squashed on a skyscraper or it just looks plain funky. You can either hit the “back” button and rearrange some stuff or de-select the ones you don’t like, and do a new display ad for just those sizes that didn’t translate too well. It’s been my experience that the skyscrapers are the ones that are trickiest to make look right from the basic layouts, so you might want to do a separate display ad builder for them.
I’ve got a good deal of experience with Flash, and of-course, a display ad builder is will never replace the creativity and functionality of a made-from scratch animation, but hell, it doesn’t take hours to do it either, and they don’t look half bad.
GOOD:
- fast & flexible
- makes multiple variations from 1 display ad
- ads can be copied into other adgroups (only in same campaign)
- easy learning curve to get started quickly
- Ads look decent enough
Bad:
- cannot rearrange elements in layouts
- ads can be copied into other adgroups (only in same campaign)
- ads won’t import into Adwords Editor
- not as creative as purpose built ads
