Google Ads’ advertisers are always seeking simpler solutions for ad management while maintaining effectiveness. Traditional Search campaigns can be a lot to manage if the advertiser has a large inventory with very specific, niche products or services or has many items that change frequently. Building and managing a Search campaign for a basic t-shirt sale is much easier than a business with a warehouse full of machine parts with specific part numbers.
Advertisers working with complicated and niche businesses can leverage Dynamic Search Ads to their advantage. A Dynamic Search Ad (DSA) can be simply described as an automation-based Search ad. This ad type allows the advertiser to reach very specific searching audiences, display optimally generated headlines, and drive traffic to specific categories or areas on a website, all while saving time and energy.
Traditional Search ads are built by manually creating keyword lists, then grouping them into similar ad groups, and writing ads for each of those ad groups based on the keywords. Depending on how big the campaign is, it can be very time-consuming. This is especially true if there are a lot of keywords that are very specific to product models. Leveraging DSAs allows for the advertiser to give Google website URLs with a few lines of description text, and essentially, Google does the rest.
Google will crawl the pages of the URL(s) given to it and use the content of the crawled page to generate audience targets, as opposed to manually entered keywords. An advertiser can choose which specific URLs to have Google pull from depending on what the PPC campaign is targeting. It can be from an overview of items on the main website page to more specific categories from specific page URLs. For example, if someone builds Dynamic Ads for an online home appliance part supply shop, the advertiser can create ad groups that target different categories. There could be an ad group specifically for HVAC parts, so the ads would want to be generated by crawling the URL(s) that contain the HVAC parts. If there was another ad group for refrigerator parts, it would be the same process using the URL(s) that contain refrigerator parts.
As Google pulls in content from the page to create audience targets, it then generates appropriate headlines based on information that is collected from the designated URL page(s). This comes in handy when a user is searching for something very specific, like a part number or spec of an item; it eliminates the need to implement keywords and write ad copy for every single model number and type. Google will then select the appropriate landing page for the ad to take the user based on the crawl and what the user is searching for.
NOTE: As Google points out, they will sometimes modify the ad headline language pulled from the website to fit Google’s terms and policies.
It is worth noting that a DSA does not have to be its own campaign. Oftentimes, advertisers will build a traditional Search campaign and include a Dynamic Ad Group(s) on its own. This can be done to either capture a specific part of the business in a campaign or as a way to get more granular with products or services while the other ad groups are advertising the business at a higher level.
DSAs give a lot of the work to Google, but advertisers can still control a number of things. This includes the URLs to target, bidding strategies, and checking search queries. Even if an advertiser does not manually enter keywords, seeing the search terms and adding negative keywords works just the same as a traditional Search or Shopping campaign. It is a nice balance of automation and control, especially when paired with smart bidding strategies.
Google’s drive to implement more automation can be scary for an advertiser, but Dynamic Search Ads provide a lot of advantages, like saving time and controlling where relevant data and signals are pulled from.
