Create Ads Using Long Descriptive Text (top-down approach)

Many times you have long descriptive text about your products, especially on their respective landing pages. The allowed length of text ads has become considerably long on many platforms. On Google Ads for example, you have slots of 30, 30, 30, 90, and 90 characters, for a total of 270. That's more than enough space to talk about the main features of your product.

The question is, how do you utilize that long description text that has all the details that you want, and make sure it fits correctly within the limits given by the platform you are using?

The ad_from_string() function does exactly that. Given a long string, it divides it into slots of any given length that you specify, and if any text remains it will be appended to the end of the returned list.

Another important benefit of this is that you can take those long descriptions (or write them) once, and then you can easily split them into different slots based on the ad format and the platform you are using.

Here is a quick overview of the available parameters and options:

s

The string that you want to split. This would typically be available on the landing pages of each product.

slots

The lengths that you want to split into. Note that although the default uses Google Ads' text ad template, you can change it to any other group of slots, with more or fewer slots of different lengths.

sep

The separator by which to split the text. The default is None which splits the text by whitespace, but you can change it to something else if needed. Sometimes you might want the text split by hyphens (URLs for example) so you can split by that character.

capitalize

The default is False which leaves the capitalization of s intact. If you set it to True then the first letter of each word would be capitalized.

Example

Note that in any case, the returned list of characters is longer than the provided slots by one. So if you provide five slots, for example, the function will always return a list of length six.

This is to ensure that the remainder of the text is not lost if it is longer, so you know what is missing. In case you have shorter text, you will still have one element more than the provided slots to ensure consistency.

Run this code

import advertools as adv
desc_text = "Get the latest gadget online. The GX12 model comes with 13 things that do a lot of good stuff for your health. Start shopping now."
len(desc_text)  # 130

Now let's see how this same description can be utilized in different scenarios

Google Text Ads

Since this is shorter than the default Google values, you will get extra empty slots (with an additional last one).

Run this code

adv.ad_from_string(desc_text)  # default values (Google text ads)

['Get the latest gadget online.',
'The GX12 model comes with 13',
'things that do a lot of good',
'stuff for your health. Start shopping now.',
'',
'',
'',
'']

Facebook Feed Ads

In this case, it is also shorter than the default value, so you get an extra space.

Run this code

adv.ad_from_string(desc_text, [125, 25, 30])  # Facebook feed ads

Since it might not look good having just one word in the second slot, and an empty last one, you might want to change it as follows:

Run this code

adv.ad_from_string(desc_text, [90, 25, 30])

['Get the latest gadget online. The GX12 model comes with 13 things that do a lot of good',
'stuff for your health.',
'Start shopping now.',
'']

Facebook Instant Article Ad

Here is a case where our text is longer than the provided limitations, so we end up having an extra space that is not used:

Run this code

adv.ad_from_string(desc_text, [25, 30])  # Facebook instant article ad

['Get the latest gadget',
'online. The GX12 model comes',
'with 13 things that do a lot of good stuff for your health. Start shopping now.']

ad_from_string(s, slots=(30, 30, 30, 90, 90, 15, 15), sep=None, capitalize=False)

Convert string s to an ad by splitting it into groups of words.

Each group would have a length of at most the allowed length for that slot.

If the total length of s exceeds the total allowed length, all remaining characters would be grouped in the last element of the returned list.

Parameters:

• s (str) -- A string of characters, with no restrictions on length.

• slots (list) -- An iterable of integers for the maximum lengths for each slot

• sep (str) -- Character(s) by which to split s.

• capitalize (bool) -- Whether or not to capitalize each word after grouping. Setting it as False would not change the capitalization of the input string

Returns:

text_ad -- A list of strings according to split spec.

Return type:

list

Examples

>>> ad_from_string('this is a short ad')
['this is a short ad', '', '', '', '', '', '', '']

>>> ad_from_string('this is a longer ad and will take the first two slots')
['this as a longer ad and would', 'take the first two slots',
'', '', '', '', '', '']

>>> ad_from_string("Slots can be changed the way you want", (10, 15, 10))
['Slots can', 'be changed the', 'way you', 'want']

>>> ad_from_string("The capitalization REMAinS as IS bY DefAULt",
...                       (10, 15, 10))
['The', 'capitalization', 'REMAinS as', 'IS bY DefAULt']

>>> ad_from_string("set captialize=True to capitalize first letters",
...                capitalize=True)
['Set Captialize=true To', 'Capitalize First Letters',
 '', '', '', '', '', '']