Troubleshooting Google Countdown Ads

Yeah, Google, for adding a feature that is wonderfully useful to the advertiser!  If you haven’t seen these, Google has implemented an automatic countdown feature in their ads, just in time for the holidays.  More details can be found on their website here.  You may, however, have run into issues trying to implement them and need help that Google is yet to be able to provide themselves.   We’re happy to share solutions to the problems that we have run into that may help save you some time.

1) The exact column order in the submission is critical:

Ad state
Ad
Description line 1
Description line 2
Display URL
Destination URL
Campaign
Ad group
Status

2) Avoid using special characters in your ads (trademark or copyright symbols) otherwise the ad will be mistaken as multi-byte and will be rejected because of length issues.   If you ads are incorrectly being geo-targeted only to Asian countries, this may be the reason.

3) Do not use slanted double quotes around the date in the countdown function.  Only use the double quotes that appear to the left of your ENTER key on your keyboard.

Hope these solutions help!