In the next part of our series on data-driven marketing in practice, we’ll take a look at the challenges Google Studio faces in practice.
- Diversified support
The Google advertising ecosystem is very complex, they have their own dco system, their own campaign manager, their own dsp. It is a unique solution that each of these has its own separate support service.
When looking for a solution to a technical problem, troubleshooting the problem first involves finding which support team the issue belongs to. It is easy to get trapped in a situation where DV360 support sends you to studio support, who sends you to CM support, who will send you to some third or fourth support. You have to be alert and find out which problem actually belongs where, and that can easily cause difficulties. - Lack of API support
Google creative studio does not have any flexible API connection points. There is no api support to help us with our work. We really like automation, we really like scripts. We use scheduled processes to manage our creatives. So we can follow anything that happens suddenly, even at night. Unfortunately, there’s no direct way to do that here, if you want to automate anything, you have to write macros and scripts that run in a browser. - Lack of automated weighting
Google creative studio supports random or by hand/manual weighting between versions. Unfortunately, it does not support automation that adjusts the emphasis between appearances. In this it is weaker than adform. So here we have to rely on either random or manual weighting. There is no other option. - Complicated UI
Among the DCO systems, the UI of google creative studio is the most difficult to learn. In daily use it leaves the most to be desired. In many cases you have to ask support for some basic functions to use them. Also features that are standard in other systems are very difficult to access in the UI - Hectic refresh, persistent cache
Typically, in Google Studio, it can take up to 2 to 4 hours between uploading your feed and the live creative changing and refreshing.What counts as fast and how tolerant the campaign is of the wait we’re working with makes a big difference here. For some changes, it takes a very long 4 hours for the data to run through the system. For example, for banking customers, this requires a lot of planning ahead. It is not acceptable to run a creative with a bad APR for hours. This is definitely something to keep in mind when running a campaign through Google Studio.
We learned 5 pros and 5 cons about Google Studio from Péter Horváth, who uses several DCO systems for dynamic ad serving and programmatic campaigns.