Creating Legacy Dynamic Banner Ads and Campaigns

Before creating your Dynamic Banner ads, make sure you've first imported your product feed and modified your tracking tag to support dynamic ads.

To create your Dynamic Banner Ad, from your Dashboard, click on Manage-> Create Ad.

Select Dynamic Banner.

Next, select the general options for your ad:

Ad Feed: The product feed you want to use for the campaign.

UTM Parameters: Allows you to add UTM parameters to your ad URLs (learn more). Note: If you include UTM parameters in your Google product feed, they will not be included automatically in your dynamic ad's URL. You will need to click the Add UTM parameters button here and insert the parameters you'd like to include in the ad URL.

Product Category:  If you wish to only advertise products from one specific category, you can select the category you wish to use with this dropdown box.

Product Price: If you wish to only advertise products of a specific price, you can filter those products out using this box. Choosing "Any" will create ads for products of any price. Selecting Less than, More than, or Between will give you the option to create ads for products of a certain price. 

Availability: Uncheck any of these boxes to stop showing ads for products marked as In Stock, Out of Stock, or Preorder.

Now it's time to design your Dynamic Banner Ad! At the bottom of the page you will find the ad builder. We offer five templates to help you get started, and each template can be heavily customized. Any time you make a change to a setting, the ad previews will automatically update, letting you immediately view your changes.

Let's start by choosing a template and ad sizes:

Select your template style (Modernism, Duality, Radiance, Timber, or Vivid.) Then choose the ad sizes you want to create. Add or remove an ad size by clicking on the size button. We support 300x250, 728x90, 300x600, and 160x600. 

Ad Customization

Ad Text Macros
We offer a variety of macros to use for your ad's text. This will allow you to dynamically insert information like the product's name, description, etc. These are the macros we currently support, and these correlate to fields in your product feed:

{{product_name}}
{{product_price}}
{{product_sale_price}}
{{product_id}}
{{product_brand}}
{{product_category}}
{{product_description}}

To use a macro, insert the above text into one of your text fields.

Text Field 1-3
You ads can contain up to three lines of text. Where the text is displayed depends on the template you've selected, so play around with different setups until you're happy with how the text looks.

We recommend using macros to advertise your products. For example, if I wanted to display the product name, the product price, and "Buy it now!", I would setup my text fields as follows:

  

You can also change the color and font size of each line of text, allowing you to customize the ads however you'd like!

CTA Button
Your dynamic ads will have a Call-To-Action button on them enticing your visitors to click and return to your site. You can customize this button using the CTA Button box:

You can use up to 15 characters of text with your button, change the font color, size, background color, and edges style (rounded or square corners) with this box.

Ad Styles
This box will allow you to customize the overall look and feel of your ads.

You can change the background colors of the ads, border color and size, and font of your ad text.

Logo
Use this box to upload a logo image for your ads.

Click "Select logo" to choose your image file. 

Note: Images with a transparent background work best for these ads. We recommend using a PNG image with a transparent background for your logos.

Disclaimer
If your products require you to display a link to a disclaimer in your ads, you can use this box to add one.

Enter your disclaimer URL and check the "Display disclaimer link" box to add the link to your ads.

Here's an example of an ad preview I designed:

I'm satisfied with how these ads look, so I'm going to click Upload and submit for review at the bottom of the page:

You're done! All ads have been created for you and can be viewed under Manage-> Ads:

The dynamic banner ad creator will allow you to create multiple ad sizes at once, but you can click on each individual ad to edit them separately, which allows for even more customization!

Note: We'll choose a product to display your ad previews for you, but you can force our system to preview a specific product by manipulating the ad preview URL. For example, if your ad preview URL looks something like this:

https://app.sharpspring.com/sites/50f3af03a/ads/123c3q23

And you wanted to preview product ID 1234567, you could change the URL to this:

https://app.sharpspring.com/sites/50f3af03a/ads/123c3q23?product_id=426590732328

And we'll preview that product! Simply add ?product_id=XXX (where XXX is the product ID) to the end of your URL.

The rest of the campaign setup process is exactly the same as any other ad type. Just make sure to select Dynamic Campaign, then Dynamic Web Campaign when you start:

Note: We will start tracking your product page views from the time you correctly configure the _pa.productId line in your tracking tag, moving forward. If you launch your dynamic campaign shortly after configuring your tracking tag, there will be a period of time needed for the campaign to ramp up impressions, since we've just started tracking your product page views. Don't be alarmed if you don't see a lot of impressions in the first couple of days after the campaign launches!

Having problems with your Dynamic Ads? Take a look at our Dynamic Retargeting Troubleshooting & Checklist.