If you keep up with Google AdWords trends, you know that recently dynamic targeting expanded into what Google is calling “Page Feeds.” Per Google, Page Feeds give you “additional control over your DSA campaigns to ensure only relevant products and services are shown to your customers. Simply provide us with a feed of what you want to promote and select the landing pages that you want to include…”. So, essentially now an advertiser can provide a simple feed to Google of the exact pages they want to target.
Creating a feed is relatively easy. Just create a small excel doc with two columns. One with what pages you want to target, and one with custom labels. The custom labels are used when creating ad groups to distinguish them from the others. Once you’re finished, simply upload it into the shared library in your AdWords account. (Shared Library > Business Data > +DATA > Page Feed).
How is this different than before? Well, there are a lot of ways it has changed. Essentially, with this feed, Google won’t serve up any other pages besides the one’s you provide. This was 100% capable before, but if your pages went deeper than just the initial “/c/example,” those pages could get targeted as well. This means an advertiser would possibly have to go exclude all pages past the initial “/c/example,” which could get extremely tasking.
Now, what you put in is all you will be targeting. Google will not target any content outside of what’s on the URL provided, nor will it serve up a different landing page.
Who Should Switch to Dynamic Page Feeds
In short, everyone could but not necessarily should. One of the biggest downfalls of dynamic, is the control aspect. You are allowing Google to decide what pages to serve up when a searcher enters a query. With the old targeting method, there was a lot left for the unknown. With page feeds, you pick exactly what page you want to show up. The advertiser knows the content on the page being served, and doesn’t have to worry about an irrelevant target coming through.
Dynamic page feeds will also help immensely with wasted cost. If an advertiser has a lower budget, page feeds could be an awesome option. The advertiser could easily pull their top-performing landing pages for their client and add them as exact auto-targets in their feed. This allows for little to no wasted spend for the advertiser, with a good return on their ad spend. This could help non-branded search too. By adding those top performing landing pages, an advertiser could find out new queries searchers may be using to find their products that they may not have thought of before. Once again, taking out the guess work, and showing to a high converting audience.
Who Shouldn’t Switch to Dynamic Page Feeds…but 100% Can Still Try Them
Now, page feeds may not be for everyone. With many of my accounts, I have very successful dynamic programs already set in place. Hours of work has been put into them to be targeted in such a way, that it would be a waste to try and redo the whole program into dynamic page feeds, lose the history to the campaigns, etc. One way I am implementing page feeds into my paid search programs is by using poor performers. I’m pulling out poor performing categories, product groupings, or URLs and creating feeds out of them. This way, I can take them out of the normal, high-performing dynamic campaigns, and give them a smaller budget with an extremely targeted objective. This will also help me narrow down why these areas aren’t performing. Is it all poor queries? Is it the auto-targets Google is applying? Or is it because dynamic just isn’t the best route for these areas?
Conclusion
Page feeds overall were the most obvious next step for Google to take with dynamic search targeting. The one area about dynamic that is criticized the most is the lack of control, and Google has seemingly fixed this. Dynamic page feed campaigns can easily show success for any paid search program. Try them out yourself!
