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Creating Your Own Templates

CREATING YOUR OWN TEMPLATES

Contents

Template Types

Static Templates

Dynamic Templates

Adding Blank Templates to My Creative

Designing a New Template

Widgets - Creative Elements

Example: Creating a Static Template

Example: Creating a Dynamic Template

Create Multiple Templates with Copy & Paste

Adding Your Own Template to Your Campaign

Scheduling Your Creative

Custom Template Upload

Templates define the creative look of an ad and what information will be used. A template has a defined size (e.g. 300×250 pixels) and typically includes text and image widgets.  

Adacado offers a variety of pre-built templates for different business types, ad sizes, and ad types for use in your campaigns. 

For users who want to design their own templates from scratch, this page provides instructions on how to create your own templates using Adacado’s powerful creative editor. Before moving on to the instruction, it is helpful to understand the types of template you can create with the creative editor and the widgets commonly used in templates.

Template Types

There are two types of templates that can be created with the creative editor.

Static Templates

Static templates can be used for static ads, which is a great way to advertise a brand, service, or single product that displays the same information every time they are viewed. However, static templates cannot be used to create dynamic ads from an inventory data feed.

Example Widgets:

  • Company Logo
  • Promotion Text 
  • CTA Button

Dynamic Templates

Dynamic templates can be used with an inventory data feed to dynamically pull values (e.g. product image, product title, price, product URL) from your inventory data feed to create hundreds or thousands of ad variations. Dynamic templates can also be used to create static ads without a data feed, either by using the template’s placeholder images and text as-is or replacing them with your own images and text.

Example Widgets:

  • Product Image
  • Product Title (or Product Description)
  • Product Price (or Sale Price or Product Price + Sale Price)
  • CTA Button
  • Company Logo 

NOTE

  • Image widget can be used to add a background image.
  • Promotion Text can be added to dynamic templates.
  • Navigation can be added if there is more than one template/product added to the ad.
  • Always choose a border color that is not white or black in settings in the template header.

Adding Blank Templates to My Creative

To get started creating your own new templates, click on your username in the upper right corner of the platform header, then click “My Creative” in the dropdown.

You are now on the creative editor page where you can see a blank grid canvas, widget toolbox, and the “Select a creative to use” panel. On this page, you can create or edit a template, and to create a new template, you need to first open a new template on the canvas.

1. Choose the business type of your advertiser (e.g., retail, auto, real estate, or hotel).
2. Choose an ad format.
3. Click the “Create New” button to open a new template on the canvas and add the widgets to design the template.

Designing a New Template

Clicking on the “Create New” button will open a blank template of the selected ad format on the canvas and display the widget toolbox in the left navigation bar. You can now find image and text widgets that determine your ad content and add them to your template.

Widgets – Creative Elements

Widgets are individual creative elements that make up the content of the template/ad (e.g. Company Logo, CTA Button Text, Product Image, Product Title, etc.). To design your template, browse the various widgets available in the toolbox on the left navigation bar of the editor page, and drag the widgets you want from the toolbox to the template. After adding the widget to the template, you can adjust the size, style, color or alignment of the widget in the individual widget settings by selecting image or text from the template.

Adacado offers a wide variety of image and text widgets to choose from and gives you full control over which widget to use in your template. Click here to learn more about the different types of widgets and how to edit them.

Example: Creating a Static Template

Let’s create a static template with the widgets that do not require product data.

  • Company Logo
  • Promotion Text
  • CTA Button

Edit Template Name

First, edit the template name by clicking the pencil icon in the template header.

Add Company Logo

First open the widgets toolbox by clicking on any area of the template, select the “Data Placeholders” widgets, then drag the “Company Logo” widget from the toolbox to the template. Upload your logo by dropping the file in the blue box in the pop-up.

Now the logo is added to the template and the widget setting for the “Company Logo” widget will open on the right, allowing you to change the image and edit the alignment. You can also adjust the size and position of the logo by adjusting the dashed box on the widget. Learn more about how to edit widgets here.

Add Promotion Text

Select the “Promotion Text” widget from the “Data Placeholders” and drag it to the template, then add your default promotion text to the widget settings, choose the font style (font type, size and color) and the text alignment options.

Add CTA Button

Drag the “CTA Button” widget to the template, adjust the size and position of the CTA button, and edit the color and alignment of the CTA button and CTA text in the widget settings. The “CTA Button” widget allows you to create only rectangular or square button, so if you want to create the button with a different shape, such as a circle, use the shape widget in the “Basic Elements” of the widgets toolbox, or use the “CTA Image Button” widget to upload your own CTA button image.

Save the Template

After adding all the widgets you need for your ad to the template, click the red save icon in the top left corner to save the template. After saving the template, click the “+” icon to open the “Select a creative to use” panel, then click the “My Templates” and find the template you saved. You can now add the template from “My Templates” to your campaign.

Edit Templates

To edit a template you have already created, select a template from the “My Templates” to open it on the canvas and add, remove or edit widgets from the template.

For example, to add a background image to a template, upload your own image using the “Image” widget in the “Basic Elements”, or select an image from the “Free-to-use Library” using the “Image Library” widget.

After adding the image to the template, edit the font color, etc. accordingly and save the changes. 

 You can now find the edited template in the “My Templates” section.

Learn more about editing widgets and templates here.

Example: Creating a Dynamic Template

Let’s create a dynamic template that contains widgets that are commonly used to display product data from an inventory data feed, along with a company logo and CTA Button.

  • Company Logo
  • Product Image
  • Product Title (or Product Description)
  • Product Price (or Sale Price or Product Price + Sale Price)
  • CTA Button

Adding your company logo and CTA button follows the same steps as static ads.

Add Product Image

Select the “Product Image” widget from the “Data Placeholders”, drag it to the template and upload your own product image, or choose one from the “Free-to-use Image Library”. 

The image inserted in the “Product Image” widget in the template will be used as the default product image for the template you are working on. The default product image will be automatically replaced with an appropriate product image if your product data provides such data, and if product image data is missing, the default product image will be displayed in the ad.

The product image is now added to the template and widget settings of the product image will open on the right where you can replace the image and edit the alignment. You can also resize and reposition the image by adjusting the dashed box on the widget.

Add Product Title

Drag the “Product Title” widget from the toolbox to the template and add text you want to use as the default product title to the widget settings. Once the default product title is added, adjust the size, position, font style and alignment of the “Product Title” widget.

Add Product Price

Drag the “Product Price” widget to the template and add the default price value to the widget settings. If price data from the data feed is missing, you will see the default price value inserted in the template will be displayed in the ad.

After adding all the widgets to the template, save the template, then you can find it in “My Templates.” 

Create Multiple Templates with Copy & Paste

After creating a template for an ad format, you can easily create a template for another ad format using the widget’s copy and paste feature.

Click the “+” icon in the toolbox to open the “Select a creative to use” panel, repeatedly select a new ad format, and click the “Create New” button to open multiple templates on the same canvas. Then select the widget from one ad format, right-click to copy the widget, select a template to paste the copied widget into, then right-click to paste the widget. 

This makes it quick and easy to create multiple templates, and it’s convenient to keep all the templates open on the same canvas when you need to edit them all. Learn more about editing widgets and templates here.

Adding Your Own Template to Your Campaign

To add your own template to the campaign, find the template in “My Templates” on the “Select a creative to use” page and select it for your campaign.

You are now on the campaign’s “CREATIVE” page. Here you can see that a theme, a collection of single or multiple ad formats, has been automatically added to your campaign, including the template of your choice. You can decide how many ad formats to include in your campaign by adding or removing templates for ad formats in your theme. 

To add a template you’ve created, click the icon, select an ad format, and find the template in “My Templates.”

After selecting templates for all ad formats you want to include in your theme, the creative editor will display your theme with all ad formats. On this page, you can edit individual templates or use the “Apply to All” option of individual widgets to update template placeholder images and text for all ad formats at once. Click here for more information on editing and customizing your ads. 

Scheduling Your Creative

You can add multiple themes to your campaign and choose when and what ads to display by scheduling themes.

Custom Template Upload

Uploading a custom HTML template is a deprecated feature and we no longer provide customer support regarding it. Only users familiar with its usage should continue.

*IMPORTANT*
Custom HTML templates cannot be edited in the creative editor. If you want to make changes to your custom HTML template, you must create a new template with a new zip file containing the updated HTML code and assets.

Sample Zip File

Upload Requirements

You must upload a zip file containing the HTML code, all image assets (company logo, main product image, navigation, etc.), and font files. 

  • The size of the template zip folder cannot exceed 10 MB.
  • All files in the template zip folder must be at the root level (i.e., no subdirectories).
  • Any external .js and .css files must remain under 2.5 MB and named template.js and template.css, respectively)
  • Third-party URLs are not allowed, which means all URLs must be relative to files within the template zip folder (this does not apply to rich placeholders of type URLs).

Rich Placeholders

Examples

  • productLink
  • productTitle
  • price
  • salePrice
  • description
  • productID

Details

  • type: text, image
  • truncate: number (integer). Applies only applies to text type placeholders. Indicates the max length at which the data value are truncated and an ellipsis(…) is appended.
  • width and height: number (integer).  Required for images. Applies to image type and video type placeholders. It should be set to the size of the image used in the template design.
  • inventoryIndex: number (integer). The index of the data to use (index 0), ie use first set of data (0), or second set of data (1), or third set of data (2), and so on. This applies only to inventory data, static data does not contain this attribute.
  • codeType: Required. Since this is dependent on the context, we have 5 code types:
    • “html”: this is used when you substitute the innertext of DOM,
      • e.g. <div>{{}}</div>
    • “javascript”: this is used when you use a placeholder anyplace in javascript.
    • “attribute”: this is used when you substitute attributes of DOM,
      • e.g. <div data-id=”{{}}”></div>
  • “url”: this is used when you retrieve any URL or files, e.g. <img src=”{{}}” />
  • “clean”: removes any possible breaking characters, which at the moment is defined as ‘, “, <, >

If you’re still having trouble or have questions, feel free to reach out to us anytime at support@adacado.com