Creating custom exits for dynamic remarketing creatives

Dynamic remarketing is a great way to improve your advertising performance, especially if your goal is to sell more products. However, working with a dynamic creative can be tricky. Some of the values required by your creative, like call to action (CTA) text, Product Names, Exit URLs, etc., are not known ahead of time and come from a product "feed". Google Web Designer's Dynamic properties dialog can help you bind such values to elements in your creative, but what if you want to post-process these values before they are bound to your creative?

In this article, we will tackle one such case - adding a custom exit function to your dynamic remarketing creative, which lets you post-process the exit URL before exiting to it.

⚠  When working with a URL, take special care to generate a valid URL and keep in mind that some browsers have a maximum supported URL length.

Let's say you have created the six-product creative below for dynamic remarketing in DoubleClick Bid Manager.

Let’s begin by adding a custom exit for product 0:

Step 1: If applicable, remove the dynamic bindings for the "Exit Override URL" within the Tap Area component of product 0.

⚠  Without this change, clicking on your creative can lead to more than one exit.

Step 2: Select the tap area for product 0 (the first product).

Step 3: Add a new event for the tap area by clicking the "+" button on the Events panel.

Step 4: Select Tap Area > Touch/Click as the event.

Step 5: For the action, select Custom > Add custom action.

Step 6: Add a function name (e.g., mycustomexit0) then paste the below code snippet into the text area. Replace the comment with the logic for your custom post-processing, then click OK.

var exitURL = dynamicContent.Product_0_url // Custom post-processing happens here Enabler.dynamicExit("exit", exitURL, "0")

💡 Use Enabler.dynamicExit() instead of the traditional Enabler.exitOverride() for dynamic creative exits and pass in the product index as the third parameter. This helps Google's optimization engine understand which product was clicked on, and allows us to further improve performance of dynamic creatives.

Repeat the above steps for the other five products in the creative, changing the index accordingly, e.g., for the second product, use index 1, and so on.

To test your changes, follow the steps in the Bid Manager dynamic creative help center article to upload your creative in Bid Manager. Then, preview the creative and click on the products to verify your custom exits are working as expected.

Creating custom exits isn't so tricky after all! We've just shown you how your dynamic creative can use custom exits and send information about product-level clicks. If you require post-processing of exit URLs, try these steps with your creatives and let us know what you think in the comments below.

Posted by Manikandan, Software Engineer