You will find some of the most commonly asked questions below regarding management of your creatives – both within the Platform and the publisher interfaces.
There may be times that you want to make changes to your creatives from within the publisher’s interface (Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, etc.) when you have revenue tracking enabled. If you have URL Builder Autocorrect enabled for your creatives, a new tracking value will be assigned to the new (or modified) creatives during the nightly sync – providing the creative receives impressions. If the creative doesn’t receive impressions, you can perform a Manual Sync to have the new value assigned. See Synchronizing Data with the Publishers for more info about manual synchronization.
The Creative ID column is not available to see within the application grid or View Builder. Once you create a report of these objects within the Creatives tab, the Creative ID column will appear in the report.
If you make an edit to a creative URL in Marin, this is regarded as a new ad in Google. The original ad will be deleted within the publisher, and a new ad will be created, however, you will only see one creative in Marin. This is because Marin will 'stitch' these two ads together.
Note: Google's old behavior was that all edits to an ad resulted in the ad being deleted and re-created on the publisher side, but this is no longer the case. Now, a deletion and re-creation only happens when URL edits are posted from Marin to the publisher. The old ad and the new ad are still stitched together in Marin.
If your publisher data appears to be over-counting for certain creatives, it is likely because we have stitched together the deleted and newly created ads in the Platform. Therefore, in Google Ads, the data prior to the edit attributes to the deleted ad and the data from after the edit attributes to the new ad. However, in the Platform, all data attributes to just one ad. You can verify if the data is correct by totaling the metrics for the deleted and active creatives in the publisher, and then subtracting the metrics attributed to the deleted creative on the day of the edit.
Note: For Google, when the URL Builder includes trailing parameters to be added to the end of a landing page, the parameters are often separated from the landing page by a '&' character or an encoded version '%26'. As a result, if the landing page which is uploaded ends in a '/', the resulting final URL would be '/&'. The majority of web servers are not meant to handle this character string. Therefore, as a preventative measure, we append '?' to the end of landing pages by default which results in '/?&'. This can cause the creatives to be re-pushed to Google and recreated in the publisher account.
If you make an edit to a creative (such as a landing page edit) in the publisher interface, this is regarded as the same ad.
IF functions allow you to insert a specific message in your text ad when a condition has been met, and a default text when it has not. This makes your ads tailored to each search and more relevant to potential customers.
Using IF functions in your ads/creatives is supported by Marin Search and MarinOne for both Google and Microsoft.