Table of Content
Marketers are forever on the hunt for new advertising opportunities and strategies. Although optimizing for organic search is beneficial, paid advertising using platforms such as Google Ads will present you a return on investment (ROI) of 200%.
The annual global ad expenditure is expected to hit US$614.73 billion by the end of this year, and marketers have a powerful, less-explored campaign type to expand their keyword coverage and drive more traffic to their websites.
The campaign is known as Dynamic Search Ads, and it has an incredible potential to fill the gaps of your search campaigns, irrespective of your current standing. In this article, we’ll discuss everything there is to know about Dynamic Search Ads and solve your dilemma of “Should I use Dynamic Search Ads?”
What Is A Dynamic Search Ad?
Dynamic Search Ads, famously known by its acronym DSA, are search advertisements shown based on your website’s content. They allow you to target your entire website, or portions of it, without the need to create keywords or ad headlines for all possible matches.
Instead, when a user searches for a relevant query, the system dynamically creates an ad headline based on the search query and the content of your most appropriate landing page.
And as the name suggests, DSAs are applicable only for search campaigns. Although there are Dynamic Search Ads for Bing, in this article, we will be mainly talking about DSAs for Google.
DSA allows you to reach out to prospects who are searching for products or services offered by you. Although you still have to provide the description line, the dynamically generated headline can grab the users’ attention and tempt them to click and visit your website.
For example, suppose you own an international luxury hotel chain. If someone searches on Google for “luxury hotel LA”, they will see your ad with the headline “Luxury Hotel – LA”.
They will probably be convinced to click on your ad, and by doing so, they will be redirected to the section of your website that is dedicated to your luxury hotels in Los Angeles. This way, DSAs can quickly forward potential customers to relevant sections of your site.
As the advert headlines and landing pages are created using your website’s content, your ad stays relevant based on the customer’s query and your offering. Here’s a video that visualizes how Dynamic Search Ads work.
Dynamic Search Ads would be most effective for advertisers having a well-developed site as Google uses the website content to target your advertisements – which also helps in filling the gaps of your keyword-based ad campaigns. DSAs can also be seen as a backup option for existing keywords and campaigns.
To make this possible, Google crawls your website to find matching web pages with the search queries, creates ad headlines with a relevant copy, and then links it to the specific web page. Here’s a Dynamic Search Ads example for your consideration.
Searching for “OLED 4k tv” gives DSAs from multiple manufacturers.
The Pros And Cons Of DSA Campaigns
Pros
- It is easy to set up as compared to traditional campaigns, and you can start running ads on several different categories within a day’s time or less.
- With DSA, ad creation becomes incredibly easier as headlines are dynamically generated based on the product or service that matches the user search query.
- You can display ads based on specific categories or pages and also prevent ads for products that are out of stock.
- DSA allows you to gain additional traffic by identifying and serving ads for keywords you aren’t targeting.
- It bridges the gap between keyword coverage and inventory or range of services as Google can crawl a page containing all product names and use it while dynamically generating the ad headlines. This will also help in targeting keywords that are otherwise flagged in Google Ads as keywords having “Low Search Volume”.
- DSAs are automatically updated with inventory changes as Google will regularly crawl your website and adjust your ads accordingly.
- Dynamic Search Ads generally have a lower CPC as they target long-tail queries having lower competition.
- You can use DSAs to find out new keyword opportunities.
Cons
- While using DSAs the overall performance of your ads account may suffer as instead of targeting high-value keyword targets, you’re focusing on a broader audience.
- A poorly optimized website won’t benefit much from DSA campaigns. Your website must be up-to-date in order to gain full benefit from DSAs.
- Your website should have an excellent search engine optimization (SEO) strategy for DSA to work.
- You won’t be able to control the headlines of your ads.
- As DSAs scrape content from your web pages, Google may crawl and fetch keywords that are irrelevant to your target audience.
- Your ad budget will be quickly exhausted if there are no negative keywords listed or structural optimization.
How To Create Dynamic Search Ads In XPO
With an advanced marketing platform Knorex XPO, creating and running Dynamic Search Ad campaigns becomes a lot easier and quicker. Check out this article to know how to create Dynamic Search Ad campaigns in XPO.
Dynamic Search Ads – Best Practices
To get the most out of DSAs, here are some best practices to follow.
- For DSAs, the quality of your website is equally important as the quality of the ads you write. As a result, before running DSA campaigns, improve your website.
- With nearly 52% of global website traffic coming from mobiles, it is critical that you make your website mobile-friendly.
- Create a negative keyword list to exclude search queries that bring irrelevant traffic.
- If your website contains pages in multiple languages and you want to target search ads for all those languages, instead of including multiple languages in a single campaign, create individual campaigns for each language.
- Make your website content easily crawlable by Google and prefer text over images. Also, use comparative terms like best, top, and fast.
- Avoid using jargons and instead explain your products or services in simple terms.
- Try a combination of multiple DSA campaigns.
- Keep your website content updated to avoid showing ads for outdated result pages.
- Depending on the search query, try including strong call-to-actions (CTAs) into the DSA description and throughout your website.
- Highlight your offers and promos in your description line.
- Use Templates from XPO Designer. Once you create a template in XPO, you can use it repeatedly and you can make modifications easily and apply it across. Thus, ensuring efficiency and save time, letting you focus on the quality of your content.
To know more about optimizing Dynamic Search Ads, check out this official checklist from Google.
When Are DSAs Not Suitable
- DSAs are not suitable for websites that change rapidly or have daily deals and customizable products.
- Dynamic Search Ads won’t work for websites from industries such as pharmaceutical, adult, and gambling.
- DSAs won’t work for websites that contain mostly images, Flash content, or sites that require customers to log in to access the majority of the website content.
- If your website only works with “HTTPS://” and not “HTTP://” then Dynamic Search Ads won’t work.
- DSAs are not suitable for small websites or sites having only a handful of pages.
Conclusion
Although the majority of marketing processes can be automated, creating relevant ad copy is something that always requires a human touch. Fortunately, DSAs can solve this limitation and dynamically generate relevant ad headlines for every target keyword.
With businesses experiencing 140% higher click-through rates on search terms for Dynamic Search Ads as compared to original ads, you’ll be missing out a lot if you don’t try it.
Try out the Knorex XPO platform to make your entire process more streamlined and hassle-free.
