Setting up dynamic Google Adwords search ads

According to statistics, 54% of Google user queries consist of more than three words, with 20% of daily queries being unique. This significantly complicates the selection of keywords for setting up and launching a search advertising campaign.

To identify the needs of the client and the most relevant search results, you have to perform a number of standard actions to select semantics. However, contextual advertising Google Ads does not stand still and there is already an opportunity to use a new marketing tool – dynamic search ads (DSA). Below we will consider in detail its advantages and disadvantages.

What are Dynamic Search Ads?

Google Adwords Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) is an innovative format that allows you to generate ad creatives automatically based on the user’s query and website content. At the same time, these ads look like standard search ads.

Dynamic ads consist of three elements:

• Headline. Formed automatically based on the search query and the content of the web page.
• Description (ad text). It is added manually. The description should be universal and suitable for any ad in the campaign. At the same time, you can specify several variants to choose from. The task of the description is to encourage the user to click on the link.
• Target URL. The system itself selects the page that most closely matches the meaning of a particular query.

How do DSA’s advertising campaigns work?

The system analyzes the content of web pages and generates relevant ads in real time. It works as follows:

1. A person enters the keywords they are looking for in the Google search box, for example, “buy laptop for school”.
2. The system scans the site, in this case an online hardware store, for information that matches the query.
3. If a relevant page is found (for example, the category “Laptops for study”), Google generates an advertising message.
4. The title is generated based on the page title and/or user query. In our example, it could be “Laptops for study with delivery in Ukraine”.
5. The page that most closely matches the query is chosen as the landing page.
6. The advertising text created earlier by the marketer is displayed in the description. Here it is better to add a call to action or information about the unique advantages of the store (UTP).
7. The result is shown to the user in the output. If a person clicks on it, he or she is immediately taken to a relevant page where the desired product can be purchased.

Important! Dynamic campaigns are especially effective for large stores with a large number of pages and a wide range of products. They allow you to cover many key phrases without having to manually create a separate ad for each of them.

Advantages of dynamic Google ads

• Quick setup and work in automatic mode. To launch a campaign you do not need to analyze semantics and keyword selection, reducing the amount of routine work. All you need to do further is to adjust the shows by adding minus words.
• Additional coverage for low-frequency queries. Google Dynamic Search Ads can be shown for queries with a frequency of less than 10 impressions/month, which is not available in other options.
• More relevant headline. The system automatically generates a headline for a specific search query. Sometimes the length of such a headline may exceed the character limit for regular text ads, but this will only expand the display of the ad.
• Ability to use extensions. All additional extensions (addresses, phone numbers, messages, additional links, etc.) are available for DSA just like regular search ads.
• Not linked to regular search campaigns. DSA does not influence and does not compete with search campaigns, they work independently, but if there is a regular search ad in your account – it will be shown.
• Click price. It is often lower than in traditional search campaigns. This is due to higher relevance, which results in a much higher CTR. The conversion rate also increases.

Weaknesses of dynamic advertising campaigns

• Not perfect headlines. Since they are formed automatically, there is a risk of sometimes getting incoherent and unattractive text. To fix this you need to carefully work on the internal optimization of the site.
• The need to add minus words. If you do not manually add minus words, there is a high probability of attracting untargeted and garbage traffic to the site, respectively, the budget will be wasted.
• Requirements for indexing landing pages. Dynamic search advertising campaign simply will not work if the site is poorly indexed, because the selection of target words is carried out automatically.
• Not suitable for sites with a small assortment, the volume of the site should be several hundred pages.
• Not effective for online stores, where the assortment is frequently updated or sales are held. This is due to the fact that the Google search robot updates the information in the index about once every two days.
• To work effectively, product pages need to be filled with relevant and useful content. The platform uses it to create ads and select key phrases.

Setting up dynamic search ads

The process of setting up a DPO starts similarly to creating a standard campaign, but has its own peculiarities.

Creating a campaign

First and foremost, decide on the goal. There are three options available for DPOs: “Sales”, “Potential clients” and “Site traffic”. Further settings will depend on the selected goal. If you want, you can choose not to specify a specific target.

Select the “Search Network” ad type, as it is suitable for running dynamic ads.

Select the name of the ads, set the desired budget and bidding strategy. At the initial stage, it is better to use small bids and a daily budget in general. This will help you avoid competition with your own standard campaigns (if they are running) and prevent you from spending money quickly. When you realize that PPCs perform better than classic search ads, you can increase the bid per click and daily budget.

In the “Campaign Settings” item, uncheck the “Enable PPC” checkbox, as PPCs are shown only in Search.

Specify the geographic regions where your target audience is located. Then select languages. If your potential customers use, for example, Ukrainian, Russian and English at once, specify them all.

In the “Dynamic ads” menu, enter the domain of your online store. This is where users will go after clicking on the ad. Also specify the language in which the system should generate ad titles.

Select targeting

The system offers a choice of three types of targeting:

1. Use Google index. This is the most common option, in which Google automatically selects URLs to be shown in ads based on the search engine index. In this case, it is important that all pages of the resource were indexed.
2. Use only URLs from the product feed. If you want to use only specific URLs that are not yet in the search engine index, you can add a product feed to the system. Its template consists of two columns – the URL itself and labels that denote the category. These labels should have clear names, as they will be used in the targeting settings. At the same time, you can specify several tags for one page.
3. Use URLs from the index and from the data feed. In this case, both previous approaches are combined. However, based on practice, it is better to use one of the first two options, because when using the third one, the system may not correctly form creatives from page content.

When launching a dynamic search campaign, it is better to choose the targeting “Use the site index in Google”. Then, after testing and analyzing the results, you can move to a more precise type of targeting “Only URLs from feed pages”.

Creating dynamic ads

Google Ads automatically generates headlines and URLs (both target and display) based on the content on the site and the keyword phrase the user enters. You are only required to set the descriptions. Adhere to the following guidelines:

1. Add multiple versions of descriptions for each group. This will allow you to test different versions of creatives and choose the most effective ones.
2. Each description can be up to 90 characters long. Use this space for important product information, describe your TOS, and include calls to action in the descriptions.
3. Descriptions should be universal and relevant to all pages in the same group. This is important because they will be shown with different auto-generated headlines – make sure the description text is suitable for any variant.

Be sure to use ad extensions to increase effectiveness. They will make your ads more visible and informative, as well as increase clickability. For this purpose, you can add clarifications, additional links, phone number, company address and other useful data.

How to increase the effectiveness of dynamic search campaigns?

1. Before running ads, make sure that the content on the promoted pages is relevant and optimized. In order to appear in the ads, the Pages must get into the Google index. The better the structure and quality of information, the more relevant creatives the system will produce.
2. Analyze login pages weekly via Google Analytics and exclude irrelevant ones. For example, blog pages, “About Us”, “Contact Us”, “Payment and Shipping”, and “Testimonials” can often be included in ads. You need to add them to the list of exceptions on the “Automatic Targets” tab in the Google Ads interface, so that the system does not show ads for them. Exclusions can be configured both at the level of an individual group and at the level of the entire campaign.
3. DSA and standard campaigns compete with each other for impressions. The system selects the type of ad to be shown based on relevance to the query, cost-per-click and other factors. It is better to use DSA not as the main tool, but as an addition to regular campaigns to cover low-frequency and unique queries. But it’s better to add keywords from regular campaigns to the exceptions for DSA, so that they don’t take traffic away from them.
4. Add the brand name in various variants to the minus words for dynamic campaigns. This will prevent branded queries from showing DSAs. They usually have a lower cost and high transaction rate, so it makes more sense to separate them into a separate campaign.

Examples of successful turnkey customization in our projects:

Example 1

Example 2

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