Responsive Search Ads vs. Dynamic Search Ads: Key Difference

Are you having doubts about your ability to understand the needs of your customers?

Online consumers are a fickle bunch, and it’s nigh impossible to know exactly what they want, all of the time. Thankfully, you’re not alone — Google Ads is armed to the teeth with innovative machine learning-based tools, which are designed for the same overarching goal:

To help you create the best possible ads for your audience.

Out of all the changes in Google Ads in the past year, the introduction of Responsive Search Ads was one of the most exciting. Similar to Dynamic Search Ads, these new ads dynamically respond to user search queries, allowing Google Ads to offer customized versions of your ad depending on the user’s needs.

Sounds a little like magic, right?

Let’s pull the curtain back on Responsive Search Ads vs. Dynamic Search Ads, to discover the differences, and how you can use them for greater advertising success this year.

In this blog, you’ll discover:

• What are Responsive Search Ads?
• Benefits of Responsive Search Ads
• Limitations of Responsive Search Ads
• When to Use Responsive Search Ads
• What are Dynamic Search Ads?
• Benefits of Dynamic Search Ads (DSA)
• Limitations of Dynamic Search Ads
• When to use Dynamic Search Ads

What are Responsive Search Ads?

This is the newest addition to Google Ads and the largest, most flexible format for Google search ads. You can create up to 15 separate headlines and 4 unique descriptions.

Each version of a responsive search ad may have:

• Three headlines — Compared to the two available in Expanded Text Ads
• Two 90-character descriptions — Rather than the single 80-character description of ETAs
• Automatic rotation — Google Ads AI will serve up various combinations of headlines and descriptions, optimizing for best performance over time.

Benefits of Responsive Search Ads

• Greater visibility in relevant searches — As the ads are customized to different user search queries, they will appear in more searches for relevant keywords. This increases the chances of a higher conversion rate.
• More flexibility — Three headlines compared to two, and two 90-character fields for descriptions. Also, all the headline options allow for greater diversity in testing.
• It saves time — With multiple descriptions and headlines up front, Google can quickly discover the most relevant combinations.
• Optimization through machine learning — If you write all the headlines and descriptions, there are 43,680 possible permutations for the Google Ads AI to play with, which provides incredible scope for testing and optimization.
• Better performance — Responsive Search Ads can generate as much as a 15% higher clickthrough rate (CTR) than normal search ads.
• Less human error — Machine learning can perform faster and more accurately than humans.

Limitations of Responsive Search Ads

• Pressure for unique headlines — As the platform may display your headlines in any order or combination, you must ensure all copy is strong and logical on its own, and unique from all others, otherwise, you’ll end up with redundant headlines.
• Less control — These ads are automated, which gives you less control over how or when your ads get triggered.
• Not possible to track individual ad copies — There is no report about which combinations are triggered on specific user queries.

When to Use Responsive Search Ads

The key feature of this ad format is its automation capability. After the initial creative process, you can let Google Ads take over, which is great if you don’t have a lot of time to do testing and tracking of key performance indicators (KPIs).

Ideally, Responsive Search Ads are best for brand awareness campaigns and also lead generation. The format drives more impressions and facilitates greater relevance between user search queries and your ad content.

What are Dynamic Search Ads?

This format is another type of automated search ad. These ads are displayed when the user search queries are related to titles or frequently used phrases from your website.

Google Ads will generate a headline that is relevant to your offers, and then display your ad with that headline to catch the attention of viewers.

• The ad headline and the landing page URL are both dynamically generated depending on the search query and your site content.
• You can write two description lines for these ads.

By using Dynamic Search Ads, we can fill in gaps in keyword-based campaigns.

Benefits of Dynamic Search Ads (DSA)

These are some of the benefits of using DSAs:

• It saves time — You don’t need to map your bids, keywords, and ad copy to each specific product on your site. This saves time in creation and also allows you to advertise to new markets faster.
• More relevant traffic — As these ads display dynamically-generated headlines, they are closely aligned with the user’s search term, and therefore more likely to attract qualified traffic to your website.
• Targeted advertising — You can decide to show broad ads based on the entire site or to select specific pages, categories, or products as the landing pages. This allows you to target smaller segments of your audience.
• Synchronized campaigns — With Dynamic Search Ads, your campaign will help your offers remain in line with trending searches and popular queries.

Limitations of Dynamic Search Ads

• Need for regular site maintenance — If your website is only updated periodically, it will be difficult to maximize the potential of dynamic search ads.
• Landing page content must be available — Take care when choosing your target pages; otherwise, you may end up with irrelevant or thin content being served to your viewers.
• Lack of customization — As the headlines are generated by the platform, you can’t design your own. If your site content is not aligned, the disharmony between your ad copy and landing pages may disrupt the customer journey.

When to use Dynamic Search Ads

Dynamic Search Ads provide marketers with two options for remarketing:

• Remarketing — It targets previous site visitors who are already familiar with your brand, and actively seeking similar products or services.
• Acquisition — You can use a DSA campaign as a standard marketing effort, and then layer several remarketing audiences within the campaign. That way, you can attract new customers, and also increase bids for people who have already visited your site.

Ultimately, Dynamic Search Ads are best for attracting relevant, targeted traffic to your website. If you have done some keyword optimization that yielded little results, it may be a good move to try DSAs.

This will help you get your ads in front of more viewers, which in turn leads to a higher CTR as the headlines will be relevant to these users.

Find What Works For You

Both these formats aim for the same goal — more relevant ads, which lead to more click traffic. However, dynamic search ads depend heavily on the content of your landing pages. The newer, more flexible responsive search ads are great for split-testing and fast optimization.

Either format can help you accomplish a closer link between user intent and your offerings, which is essential to drive conversions.

Google Ads has a great array of tools and techniques for reaching your audience in 2019. But you can look beyond the platform for help with your performance analysis.

PPCexpo makes it easy to track the key metrics of your paid advertising campaigns with our innovative, interactive PDF reports. With our dynamic tools, you can perform better data analysis on your ads and web traffic, which allows for smarter decisions in your advertising business.

In the end, it all comes down to testing. Try, test, learn, then try again!