Feeds for Responsive Display ads: Also usable for ads for news/articles?
I manage an account for a news outlet (solid BtB news from a trusted publisher) on the display network. That’s currently done manually, which is quite tedious since news doesn’t continue to be news for long, so we need to remove and create news ads quite frequently.
I have used feeds for other advertisers before, but in those cases it was for products or services (e.g. for dynamic remarketing). The help article also mainly talks about products and services.
So my question is: Can we use feeds to create ads that leads to articles instead of products/services/landing pages or is this a no-go?
Ideally we would use a feed with an article on each row (that gets updated frequently at our end, of course) for both new audiences (discovery/brand awareness) and remarketing (retention), but not dynamic remarketing (no point in advertising an article someone has already read). Basically generic headlines and images: It’s just the description and final URLs that would set ads apart.
Feeds would be far easier to manage than a custom integration with the Google Ads API.
I’m obviously happy to provide more context, if needed be.
The short answer is:
Absolutely yes, you can and should use feeds for your news articles with Responsive Display Ads (RDAs), even though the documentation heavily favors e-commerce products.
The key is to select the Custom business type for your feed instead of a retail one.
This allows you to treat each article as a unique “item” with a unique ID, headline, and URL.
This approach will vastly simplify the process of rotating time-sensitive news content, moving your management from tedious manual work to scalable, automated, feed-based updates.
The long answer is:
Your idea is not only possible but is the correct, modern approach for news publishers on Google Ads.
The traditional Dynamic Remarketing setup, which uses a feed, is tailored for products but Google provides a generic or “non-retail” feed for precisely this kind of non-standard use case.
This feed structure, housed in the Business Data section of Google Ads, is designed to support custom entries like articles, job listings, or services.
You would have one row per article, where the columns include a unique ID, the Final URL for the article, the Article Title (which can feed the ad’s headline), a short Description, and a link to the article’s hero Image URL.
The main hurdle you face is the creation and maintenance of this feed.
Manually updating a CSV file in Google Ads Business Data daily or hourly is just as tedious as manual ad creation.
This is where an affordable, API-based solution shines, and you don’t need a full-blown Google Ads API integration.
The solution lies in using the Content API for Shopping in conjunction with a modern server-side tagging setup.
While the Content API’s name suggests e-commerce, it can be used to push non-retail feed data to Google Merchant Center (or directly to Google Ads Business Data for some campaigns) easily and automatically from your Content Management System (CMS).
The most elegant and cost-effective method to automate this is to leverage Google Tag Manager (GTM) Server Container with a service like Stape or Google Cloud Platform as the hosting environment.
Your CMS or an internal service can push the structured article data (Title, ID, URL, Image) to your GTM Server Container’s endpoint.
From the server container, you can then use a custom template or a lightweight Google Ads API call to automatically update your “Articles” feed in Google Ads in near real-time.
This entirely bypasses the need for a complex, custom-built Google Ads API application, which you rightly want to avoid.
You pay a small hosting fee for the GTM server environment, but you gain an automated, reliable system for cycling your news ads instantly, significantly improving the timeliness and relevance of your display campaigns for both new audiences and, more importantly, for exclusion lists (to avoid remarketing read articles).
This setup moves the heavy lifting to a single, cheap server-side endpoint that acts as a central data hub, future-proofing your entire measurement and advertising setup.
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