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Google Dynamic Ads: How Does DSA Work for You?

We all appreciate a level of automation in our daily lives as marketers. We can focus on the most critical tasks. Better still, gain insights we may have overlooked.

Even with automation, there is still work to do. Without the right inputs, the most efficient automation will not yield any results.

Automation is now ubiquitous. Google Smart Campaigns, Facebook Automated Ads, and now Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs)

Example to Understand Dynamic Search Ads:

DSAs are a type of ad that Google creates based on a user’s query.

Let’s say that you have an eCommerce site that sells phones and their accessories. You also offer phone repair services. Here is how DSAs would work:

A user keys in ‘iPhone 13 Pro’.
Google crawls your eCommerce site.
Finds the most relevant page.
Uses your site content, for example, your headline to create an ad that’s relevant.
Shows the ad to the user.

That is automation on another level. Isn’t it?

Parts of Dynamic Search Ads You Have to Create

You can help Google create more optimized DSAs. This will be our focus in this article. Google Dynamic Search Ads, what does the advertiser provide while creating ad copy?

There are several options here:

Landing Pages

This works best if you already have other campaigns running. You can use the same sites as landing pages on your DSAs.

Google recommends this option if you are using DSAs for the very first time. This will allow you to determine whether you are getting any increased traffic. Most marketers see a 10 to 15% increase in traffic.

Let us say that you are running a campaign. The landing page targets the ‘iPhone 13 Pro’ page. When setting up your DSA, you need to choose the category as ‘landing pages from your standard ad groups’.

How to Optimize Your Landing Page for DSAs

To create landing pages that result in appealing and relevant DSAs:

Write Explanatory Descriptions

Write descriptions that will help a customer decide. For example, describe the most important features. Here is a detailed description of our iPhone 13 Pro example:

New OLED display with ProMotion. Fastest smartphone chip ever. Breakthrough battery life

The above statement is more descriptive than ‘Good camera and long battery life’.

Avoid Replacing Content with Images

Images are part of your site’s content. It is however difficult for Google to pick and serve them as part of DSA Campaigns. Visuals help make a site appealing. However, you still need to add a detailed description.

Be Wary of Buzzwords

Buzzwords are words that trend for a particular reason. They frequently suffer abuse and misuse. They may cause buzzword backlash. This is where the word stops being used and eventually fades into oblivion. Buzzwords may also result in your ads being shown in irrelevant queries.

Add a CTA (Calls to Action)

These are a must-have. You need to tell users what to do after reading your amazing descriptions. You can have different CTAs like ‘buy now’ or ‘add to cart’.

The Pages To Target

Google uses your site’s content to create theme-organized sets of landing pages. You get to choose the sets of pages that Google can choose from. You can also group related pages. Google may take up to 24 hours to populate the categories.

Let’s look at an example.

Remember our eCommerce site that sells phones and their accessories? DSAs would automatically create categories like ‘iPhones’, ‘Android phones’, and ‘phone covers’. You can choose the pages that Google has automatically created for you.

Alternatively, you can also search for the categories that you want to target. Let’s say that you want to target the ‘Apple AirPods’ page. Key in ‘Apple Airpods’ in the search box above the category view.

The URLs to Target

You can also choose the pages that you want to target based on URLs. Again, there are several options here:

Targeting a specific page’s URL. To drive traffic to the ‘Apple AirPods’ page, you can target its URL.
Excluding a particular page. Target the URL of a page you want to be excluded in DSAs.
Target URLs with a specific string. You can check for certain strings in URLs. You can check for repair-related pages, for example. This means that Google would add all the URLs with ‘/repairs’ to your DSAs.

Using a Page Feed

You create a list of all the pages you want to target. You can then add custom labels to categorize them.

To do this, you will need a page feed. Google provides a page feed template. You can also use a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet needs to have at least 2 columns. One for the page URL and the other for your custom labels.

Ensure that you only enter one URL per row. If you have set up tracking for your URLs, don’t add them to the page feed.

You can enter over one custom label, as long as you separate them with a colon. You can enter custom labels based on iPhone models, for example. Your custom labels could be:

iPhone 13 Pro Max, iPhone 13 Pro, Phone 13, iPhone 13 mini

Custom labels tell Google to exclude or include page feed subsets.

You can also tell Google to use the URLs from your page feed only. Google can also use both URLs from your feed and from its index.

URLs from both sources only show if the feed URLs don’t have custom labels. DSAs prioritize custom labels over pages created from Google’s index.

Page Titles

You can choose to target pages with titles that contain particular words. For example, you can choose page titles with the word ‘iPhones’.

Page Content

You can tell DSAs to include pages with particular words in your ads. For example, all pages with the word ‘iPhone 13 Pro’.

Don’t Ignore Headlines In Your Website Content

Content in your website especially headlines are very important because these are picked up by Google to create your advertisement catchy ad copy for your DSA campaigns. You can find good keywords for your website content which match the intent of customer and also link with your product or services. PPCexpo Keyword Planner is a good tool to shortlist best keywords for your SEO, PPC and other digital marketing strategies.