Dynamic Search Ads: Pros, Cons, And How To Use Them?

Website owners put a lot of effort into designing their ads to drive traffic and make their PPC ad campaigns more successful.

The majority of them opt for the most widely used platform, Google Ads, to run their ad campaigns.

But, what if you can drive more traffic to your website by putting in minimum effort in Google ad campaign designing? 

Yes, we are talking about the dynamic search ads (DSA) feature of Google ads.

This article shall discuss Google dynamic search ads, their pros and cons, and how to set up dynamic search ads in Google.

Let’s dive in.

What Are Dynamic Search Ads?

Dynamic Search Ads are a specific category of Google Ads campaigns that automate the process of creating ad headlines and choosing landing pages for the ad using your website content.

Google dynamic search ads use the web crawling algorithm of Google search bots instead of manual keyword selection for targeting specific search queries. It helps advertisers to target a broader audience.

How Do Google Dynamic Search Ads Function?

The DSA Google ads work in the following steps,

1. You provide the domain name to Google Ads.
2. Google crawlers crawl your website content and identify relevant keywords to target.
3. After that, they automatically generate ads with headlines and relevant landing pages.
4. When searchers perform search queries using the keywords you target, Google offers DSA ads to satisfy those queries.

How To Set Up Dynamic Search Ads In Google?

You must follow the following steps to set up Google dynamic ads,

1. Login to your Google Ads account and click ‘Create campaign’. 

   

2. Here, you need to specify your objective, such as ‘Leads’ or ‘Sales’.
3. Next, you need to select the type of your campaign. Click ‘Search’ to make your campaign dynamic. 

   

4. You need to decide the bidding strategy of your Google DSA ad campaign on the next step.
5. Then, after entering necessary campaign details like languages, location, and audience segments, you must click ‘Dynamic Search Ads setting’. 

   

6. If you cannot find ‘Dynamic Search Ads setting’, click on ‘More settings’ to find the same. 

   

7. You need to enter your domain name and select the language for your target audience in the next step. 

   

8. After finishing the above step, clicking the ‘Next’ button will take you to the page to set up your ad groups.
9. You need to click the ‘Create ad group’ button on that page. 

   

10. Next, you must select ‘Dynamic ad group’ for your ad campaign. 

    

11. The tool will offer various targeting options in the next step. 

    

12. You need to select any of the following three options,

Specific Webpages: This option will allow you to select the exact URLs for your Google DSA campaign and hence offer maximum control. That also ensures that your readers land on a well-optimized landing page.

All Webpages: You can choose this option to target your entire website. However, you must ensure that you exclude pages (like Careers, Terms and Conditions, etc.) that are irrelevant to your dynamic Google Ads campaign.

Categories: This option will offer you a category list and preview examples of Google dynamic search ads.

Once you finish targeting options, the tool automatically creates ad headlines using your website content.

Next, write an engaging ad description and click ‘Done’. The tool also allows you to create multiple ads for a single category.

Once your ad copy is ready, you need to set up the assets, budget, and name of the campaign before making it live.

The Pros And Cons Of Google DSA Campaigns

Though Google DSA advertising saves your time and effort, it comes with its own pros and cons.

Let us talk about the pros first,

The Advantages Of Google Dynamic Ads

1. Google dynamic search ads offer you new keywords from the search terms.
2. Dynamic search ads in Google save you time by automatically generating ad headlines.
3. Dynamic search ads in Google ensure leading your readers to a well-optimized landing page.
4. You need not perform exhaustive manual keyword research to set up dynamic search ads in Google.
5. It ensures you drive only relevant traffic to your website.
6. Dynamic search ads in Google allow you to target a broader audience.

Now, let’s see what cons you can face while using dynamic search ads in Google.

The Cons Of Dynamic Google Ads

The following are the main disadvantages of using Google dynamic search ads,

1. Google dynamic search ads do not offer complete control over your ad copies.
2. Targeting a broader audience using Google DSA ads can make your campaigns less effective and provide uncertain results.
3. Dynamic search ads in Google can only create captivating ad headlines and choose the correct landing pages if your website is well structured.
4. It can become inefficient if you do not properly refine the targeting of your Google dynamic search ads by adding exclusions for irrelevant pages.

How To Optimize Dynamic Ad Targets?

The following are the best practices for optimizing your Google DSA campaigns,

Target Specific URLs Only

Selecting the list of URLs you want your DSA campaign to show against relevant search queries is essential.

It is especially important if your website is large and offers many web pages irrelevant to that specific DSA campaign.

Specifying the list of URLs ensures driving traffic to those web pages only. 

Target A Whole Category

If you want your dynamic search ads in Google to target a large number of web pages, then setting up your Google DSA campaign can be tedious and difficult to manage over time.

Instead, if you target the whole category of those kinds of web pages you want your DSA campaign to target, it can resolve this issue.

Google Ads identifies a list of relevant queries related to that category of your landing pages and automatically generates compelling dynamic search ads satisfying those queries.

Target Content Or Page Titles

This method allows your Google dynamic search ads to target specific terms either used in the content or the title of specific web pages.

Google Ads analyzes those specific web page content and titles and generates dynamic search ads for related search queries.

That makes your DSA campaigns more precise and to the point.

Target Layer Audiences

If your DSA campaigns are not yielding enough fruitful results, your campaigns target too broad of an audience.

In that case, you must ensure that your Google dynamic search ads target more specific and qualified audiences.

You need to comply with the following steps in your Google dynamic search Ads to achieve the same,

First, go to the campaign settings and click ‘Audience Segments’.

Next, you need to select ‘Targeting’ instead of ‘Observation’ under the ‘Targeting setting for this campaign’ tab.

Add Exclusions In The DSA Campaign

Suppose there are web pages on your website that do not offer content relevant to a specific DSA campaign, or you do not want to drive paid traffic to specific pages using your DSA advertising. In that case, you must exclude them from targeting.

Moreover, you must monitor the ad performance of the selected URLs at regular intervals. You can add the URLs in your exclusion list which are not providing satisfactory results.

Add Negative Keywords In DSA Ads

DSA campaigns often target irrelevant search terms you may not want your ads to target.

You won’t want to waste your ad budget on such irrelevant keywords for apparent reasons.

You can avoid these by properly adding negative keywords to your DSA campaigns.

You can either create a new list of negative keywords or import an existing list of negative keywords used in your previous campaigns.

How To Gain Maximum Benefits Using DSA Advertising?

Now that you know the best practices to follow for your DSA campaigns, we will provide you with some more vital tips that will help you gain maximum benefits from your Google dynamic search ads,

Perform Keyword Research

You may think that Google dynamic search ad campaigns do not need manual keyword research, so why do you need to perform one?

Well, the answer is for your competitors.

Performing keyword research for your competitors’ websites helps you identify the keywords they are targeting that you need to include.

RankWatch offers the best free keyword research tool to make this task a breeze without extending your DSA advertising budget.

The tool will suggest a list of organic and long-tail keywords related to the seed keyword of your competitor in the blink of an eye.

The tool also provides search volume, cost-per-click, and keyword difficulty (competition) for each keyword.

Monitor Ranking Keywords Of Your Competitors’ Ad Campaigns

It would be of great help if you monitor the ranking keywords of your competitors’ ad campaigns to understand which of their landing pages are performing well for which keywords.

The RankWatch tool can provide ranking keywords for your competitors’ ad copies.

You can further optimize your Google dynamic search ads campaign accordingly.

Monitor Ranking Trends Of Competitors’ Ads

The rank tracking feature of the RankWatch tool allows you to monitor the ranking trend of your competitors’ ad campaigns.

You can get an idea of how your DSA campaign will perform by targeting those keywords.

Conclusion

The success of an ad campaign largely depends on how captivating the ad headline is, how well the ad content is optimized for targeting the relevant keywords, and how relevant the landing pages targeted by your ads are.

Google dynamic search ads campaign helps you ensure all the above three factors with minimum effort.

Google DSA ads do not call for manual keyword research and automatically create dynamic ads with engaging headlines and offer relevant landing pages from your existing web content, provided your website is well-structured and offers rich content.

However, like all shortcuts, Google DSA ads also have a few limitations. Like, it does not offer complete control over your ad copies, it can make your ad campaigns less effective by targeting a too big audience, and Google dynamic ads often target irrelevant search queries.

However, you may optimize your DSA campaigns by targeting the right URLs, excluding irrelevant web pages, and adding negative keywords in your DSA campaign settings.

Monitoring the ranking keywords and their ranking trends of your competitors’ ad copies may help you gain an additional edge.