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CREATE YOUR OWN CUSTOM THEME

CREATE YOUR OWN CUSTOM THEME

Before starting, it is helpful to understand the components that make up a theme. 

A theme is a collection of storyboards. Storyboards are collections of templates. Templates define the creative look of an ad, and what information will be used.

Here are some diagrams which illustrate what this means:

To create a custom theme we must first make (at least) one template for each ad size we want to be part of our theme. 

There will be one storyboard per ad format, the example theme contains 6 storyboards.

A storyboard can contain one or more templates. If you want to create an ad that only shows one product, you only need to add one template to each storyboard. If you want more product frames, simply add more templates.

Steps

These steps can be completed in a different order, but you will not be able to create the Theme until you have created your Templates. To make testing easier, add product data after you have created your theme.

1.

Create relevant Advertiser

2.

Create a Campaign

3.

Add product data

4.

Create the Template(s)

5.

Create the Theme

A Note About Business Types

Different types of businesses have different requirements from their advertising campaigns. To keep things relevant, when you create an advertiser or template you will be asked to choose your Business Type so that only relevant options are available. The Business Type of your Advertiser and your templates should match.

Retail

Merchants of online purchasable products should use this Business Type

eg. https://www.amazon.com

Auto

Automotive dealerships and sellers should use this Business Type

eg. https://www.autotrader.com

Real Estate

Property and Development advertisers should use this Business Type

eg. https://www.remax.ca

There are exceptions to these categorizations which depend on what data you want to use in your campaign. If you want to target viewers based on their location and have location data for your products, then the Real Estate Business Type might be a better option.

What makes the Business Types different from each other?

The main differences between Business Types is what data is available to be used in your ads. Some data types are available in each Business Type, and some are unique to particular Business Types.

For example, a company that sells clothing won’t have mileage data for their T-shirts, but an automotive dealership (often) will!

Create A New Advertiser

An advertiser is the merchant/seller/brand or other entity you are creating campaigns for.

1.

At the top of the screen on the right hand side the current advertiser is listed in a blue button. Click this button → Click Add New Advertiser

2.

Fill out the advertiser information. You can’t change the Business Type or Time Zone later so make sure these fields are correct

Create Your Templates

Click the hamburger menu on the top right of the screen, next to your account email address → Click My Templates

Click the Create New Template button

Choose the Create option and fill in the forms for Name, Business Type and Format → Click Save

    • You should set the template to use the same Business Type that the Advertiser will be set to

You are now in the template editor. Here you can:

    • Change border color and background color (it’s best practice to avoid black or white border colors)
    • Add widgets and adjust settings to create your design
    • Use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out of the workspace

Widgets are either:

  1. Dynamic, meaning their values will come from product data, set by the product feed, or
  2. Static, meaning their values are set manually within the system. Some static widgets are only adjustable through the template editor, and others can be adjusted in the campaign theme view settings later on.

Here are some of the commonly used widgets and their respective Business Types:

Text (Static – only editable in template editor) – Retail, Auto, Real Estate

Image (Static – only editable in template editor) – Retail, Auto, Real Estate

Navigation (Static – only editable in template editor) – Retail, Auto, Real Estate

Product Title (Dynamic) – Retail, Auto, Real Estate

Product Description (Dynamic) – Retail, Auto, Real Estate

Product Image (Dynamic) – Retail, Auto, Real Estate

Product Price  (Dynamic) – Retail, Auto, Real Estate

Company Logo  (Static – editable in theme view) – Retail, Auto, Real Estate

CTA Button (Static – editable in theme view) – Retail, Auto, Real Estate

Promotion Text (Static – editable in theme view) – Retail, Auto, Real Estate

Make (Dynamic) – Auto

Model (Dynamic) – Auto

Trim (Dynamic) – Auto

Year (Dynamic) – Auto

Condition (Dynamic) – Retail, Auto

Bathrooms (Dynamic) – Real Estate

Bedrooms (Dynamic) – Real Estate

City (Dynamic) – Real Estate

Address (Dynamic) – Real Estate

Postal Code (Dynamic) – Real Estate

To use a widget in your template design, simply click and drag into the workspace. 

    • For Image and ProductImage widgets , drop your files into the popup box, or click to use your file explorer to find and upload the desired files.

Once a widget has been added to the workspace, you can adjust its settings by selecting the widget and adjusting the settings on the right hand side of the screen.

    • Right click on widgets in the workspace to change the layering of what is in front and behind.

Text widgets whose values will (eg. Product Title) or can (eg. CTA Button) change have an optional setting called Max Chars, short for Max Characters. Adding a value in this box will mean that text which has more characters than this number will be truncated. Because we are often creating templates for many different variations of product data, it is a good idea to set this value with an appropriate number. 

    • If there is no value set for Max Chars then some products may have text which is cut off at the top and/or bottom of the widget.
    • A good practice is to take one of the longer strings of text from your product data and use that as the placeholder text and make sure it fits. You can then use a character counting website to determine what the maximum number of characters a piece of text can have before it is truncated, and set that number to be the Max Chars value.

One way to save space for text widgets that may display long text is to set a line height value. Try values like 1.1 or 1.2 for a slightly ‘tighter’ look.

Make sure to save your work often!

Create A New Campaign

Setup

Choose your campaign objective, this setting affects the way in which your campaign will be retargeted to viewers of your ads. Different Business Types have different campaign objectives available.

Products

You can also skip this step initially and come back to it later. Themes are generally easier to manually test when there is no product data in the campaign/advertiser.

Setup your data feed

  1. Decide whether the data will be used for this campaign only, or shared between all campaigns under the advertiser.

  1. Choose HTTP/HTTPS for the protocol if your data feed is a URL, or FTP if it is hosted on an FTP.
  2. Paste in the URL of the data feed → Click Fetch Sample
  3. Choose delimitation settings if applicable (eg. CSV files and Google Sheet URLs are delimited by commas)
  4. Map the data field buttons onto the column headers of the feed sample displayed.
    • Mapping the data fields to column headers changes what product data is available in the campaign. For example, if your themes use Product Title, then you will need to map the Product Title data field to a column in the feed. 
  5. Choose the frequency and time of day at which the data feed should be processed, or leave the default settings as they are. 
    • If your feed automatically updated at a certain time each day (eg. 11pm PST), you should set the feed processing schedule to occur shortly after that time (eg. 11:30pm PST). This ensures your campaigns will use the most up to date information available. We suggest setting the schedule to at least 30 minutes after your feed is updated, allowing a little safety cushion of time between the file update and the processing of data.
  6. Scroll to the top of the page and click Save.

Creative

Click Create New Theme. You are now in the theme view of your new, blank theme. 

You can give your theme a name, which will be shown on the shareable preview URL page and in your Theme Performance report.

Click Add Storyboard → click Create New Storyboard

    • Add your custom templates here. If there are many templates to choose from, you can filter the templates with the options on the left hand side.  Hover over a template and click the green check mark to select it.
    • Adjust the storyboard settings. You have 30 seconds play time for your ad and the current play length of the storyboard is shown on the left hand side of the storyboard settings page.

 To create a one frame ad, the suggested settings are pictured below:

To create a 5 frame ad, you can use the following settings on each template in the storyboard. These settings allow for 6 seconds per template, and with 5 frames at 6 seconds each, you have cleverly used all of your 30 seconds.

      • Click the Save button at the top right and then click Back To Themes

Add any other Storyboards and Templates you would like to be in your custom theme.

If you need to adjust a template after it has been added to a storyboard you can do that by going back to the template editor and making the changes, however the templates in your theme will not be automatically updated.

    • To update the storyboard with the most recent version of a template, you will need to re-add the template to the storyboard. 
    • Click Add Template, add your template to the storyboard, and then delete the newly added template by clicking the X on the upper right corner of the template itself. 

The left hand side of the theme view lets you adjust the settings for some static widgets in the templates like Company Logo, CTA Text or Promotion Text. What data fields are shown here is dependant on what widgets the templates in the theme are using.

    • There are also options to add values for dynamic widgets here. If your campaign doesn’t yet have product data, you can use this panel to manually test different values. If there is already product data added to the campaign then adjusting the values for dynamic widgets won’t have an effect.

To see what the ads will look like in the published versions, click the toggle between Ad Preview and Creative View, shown under the theme name. 

    • Creative View (the default setting) shows you a mix of product data (if available) and any placeholder data used in place of real data. 
    • Ad Preview shows what the live ads will look like, this setting is a good way to test if you’ve missed adding any necessary information on the left hand side (company logo for example) or if your product feed was mapped incorrectly.

Publishing

    • The Shareable Preview Page URL will let you share your campaign creative with others.
    • Pixel <script> tag is necessary for product retargeting.
    • Adtags can be found here, which are needed for publishing your ads.