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Everything You Need to Know About Dynamic Search Ads

Looking for an expansion opportunity for your Adwords account? Consider a Dynamic Search campaign.
What Is Dynamic Search?
Beyond the numerous keyword targets in your account, there are millions of unique searches that don’t always exactly match to your targets. Dynamic search allows Google to choose when to show your ad based on the relevancy of the search to a page on your website and ad instead of specifying specific keyword phrases you want to show for.
You start by telling Google to target a page on your website – a product category page, for example. Google scans the site to determine what the page is about and then shows your ad for searches that match the same concept. The ad is written by you with a dynamically created title (to keep it relevant to the search) and takes the user to that page. This means you’re able to show your ads for many more searches than just the ones you specifically list ahead of time.
shutterstock_99337259When This Strategy is Most Effective:

  • Large inventory of widely ranging products

Let’s say you sell t-shirts with funny sayings on them. You might not be able to capture every single individual shirt caption in your ad groups, plus you don’t know how people are going to search on those phrases. Further, users may also search on t-shirt color or size along with the phrase. Since these searches could include so many variations, it’d be difficult to cover them all with your regular campaigns. This causes you to miss out on valuable traffic. Dynamic search will help you capture all the variations people use to describe shirts like the ones you sell.

  • Lots of searches using SKU numbers

If you don’t want to bid on the hundreds or thousands of different SKUs you provide, you may want to use dynamic search to help capture all of those searches without needing to manage so many different ad groups. You can still make sure to cover the most important SKUs in your regular ad groups, but dynamic search can cover the less important ones and save you time on management.
Advantages:

  • Gain wider visibility for searches you weren’t already targeting.
  • Use the search query reports from this campaign to discover new keywords you may not have already thought of. By manually adding them to your account in the appropriate ad group, you can ensure your ad shows for future searches with more specific messaging to optimize click-through rate.

Disadvantages:

  • Lose some control over what you show for. Sometimes Google really stretches and serves your ad for irrelevant searches. Closely monitor search query reports to block phrases you don’t want to show for.
  • Even if you’re already bidding on a keyword in another ad group, sometimes Google will serve this group’s ad instead. The dynamic search ad is probably not as good as the one you wrote for the other ad group so it sets you up to potentially lose clicks for that keyword. Watch search query reports and negative match anything that you’re already bidding on elsewhere to prevent that from happening.
  • Although you gain visibility, these searches may not convert as well as the ones you already have so if ROAS is an important metric, this may negatively impact it.

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Kelsey Cadogan

Kelsey has been in the digital marketing industry since 2010 with experience working both in-house and agency-side. Her specialty is in paid search marketing although her experience also includes search engine optimization, content marketing and social media marketing. When not in the office or relaxing at home, she can be found at the nearest volleyball court.

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