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Change is a constant in PPC marketing. Your competitors change, Google Ads changes, user’s change — your strategies are in perpetual motion. It’s why Google Ads users spend more time managing their campaigns than creating them.
One of the chief problems is that you have to create ad messages that serve a wide audience, when every customer is motivated by different needs and behaviors. Thus, it’s hard to maintain relevant messaging with every member in your target audience.
This is especially true with businesses and e-commerce websites that offer hundreds-of-thousands of products. What if there was a way to adapt your ad to each unique user?
Dynamic Display Ads maybe that solution.
To decide whether Dynamic Display Ads fit the needs of your marketing and advertising, you first need to understand the basics. What is it? Who does it benefit? This section will run through a simple overview of Google Dynamic Display Ads to help you answer these questions and more.
Dynamic Display Ads are a unique ad format in the Google Display Network. Unlike traditional ads that are static and remain the same for all users, Google Dynamic Display Ads automatically adapt to the individual customer.
By using signals from each user’s data, Dynamic Display Ads can determine the most relevant products and offers for each person. These signals include what products the user has already browsed and what types of websites they’ve visited in the past.
Once Google determines what types of products the user is most interested in, then it scans your product data feed for options that match these interests. For example, if a person frequents websites relating to sneakers, it will target this person with ads for the sneakers that your e-commerce store sells.
Dynamic Display Ads are subject to the same standards, policies, and requirements that govern all Google Ads messages.
Creating ad messages that dynamically change to meet the user’s interests is very compelling for advertisers. That said, there are some Google Ads users that benefit more from the use of Dynamic Display Ads than others.
Businesses With Lots Of Products: To maximize the potential value of your Google Dynamic Display Ads, you need to have an expansive product feed that is rich with attributes, pricing and other details. If you have a wide selection of products, this is a great method to connect users to the right items in your catalog.
Businesses That Update Products A Lot: If you have this detailed product feed and you update it frequently, Dynamic Display Ads can be a very advantageous format. It is a fast and effective way to update your ad messages with the latest offerings.
Businesses With Direct competition: You can actively compete with competitors by updating your feed with the latest offers and position your products above the rest. This is crucial if you’re in a very competitive industry.
B2C Over B2B: Dynamic Display Ads are primarily used by B2C companies and ecommerce stores that want to sell products in competitive spaces. That said, these ads can be used for B2B companies, especially if they offer a wide variety of services or packages.
The main difference between a Dynamic Display and an Responsive Display Ads is Responsive Display Ads are another type of adaptable ad format offered on the Google Display Network. There is some common confusion between these two features and some marketers make the mistake of using the names interchangeably. It’s important to realize that these are two distinctly different features.
A responsive-display-ad is like Pudding that fits into any-sized pan for non-responsive-display-ads, a set of templates (pans) are preselected. A dynamic display ad is Pudding in the same sized pan with different toppings, the toppings are the feed-data. The pudding with tailored toppings that follows a user for delivery is akin to dynamic-remarketing.
Now that you have a brief overview of Google Dynamic Display Ads, the next question in your mind is, “Why do I care?” In other words, what benefits are offered by Dynamic Display Ads? And, are there any drawbacks? These are important questions to answer because it allows you to evaluate the potential use of this feature in your own campaigns.
The ability to quickly update your product feed and publish it to your Dynamic Display Ads makes for a fast, efficient and flexible ad medium. If you have a dynamic product catalog, then you need dynamic ad messages!
This efficient flexibility is also crucial in highly competitive industries. If you need to react rapidly to frequent changes in the competitive landscape, Dynamic Display Ads offer the perfect opportunity to do just that.
You have many different customers or audience segments and each one has its own set of wants and needs. With Dynamic Display Ads, you can improve the personalization and relevance of your ads by targeting the specific interests of these groups.
For multinational companies, this ad feature can be used to localize content efficiently based on the location of the individual. This is crucial if you are serving customers in different languages and cultures.
Due to the increased localization and personalization of Dynamic Display Ads, they have a proven history of higher clickthrough rates than the traditional, static ads. More clicks means more opportunities to convert!
If you don’t have an existing data feed, creating this asset can be time- and resource-intensive. Not to mention, you need to continuously maintain and manage this data sheet for errors and issues. Otherwise, your ads may be published with the wrong information!
The optimization offered by Dynamic Display Ads takes time to perfect. If you are running short or infrequent campaigns, then the messages won’t have time to build their understanding of user interests, which will result in less-than-optimal targeting.
Utilizing Google Dynamic Display Ads to their full capabilities requires a sizable Google Ads budget.
To create your first Dynamic Display Ad, you can follow the same setup process that you would normally use to create an ad campaign on the Google Display Network. The difference is that you will check the “Use a data feed for personalized ads” option when creating your ad.
This will require you to first upload your data feed into Google Ads. This section will explore that process and the mistakes that can set advertisers back.
The most common format for a data feed is a simple .CSV document — an excel spreadsheet. To ensure that your data feed has all of the right information and dimensions, Google has a template for each type of business.
To find the sample spreadsheet for your business, choose the “Tools & Settings” option from the top bar of your Google Ads menu. It is referenced by a wrench icon.
From the drop-down menu, select “Business data” under the “Setup” heading.
Click the blue plus icon.
Then, select “Dynamic display ad feed” from the new menu. This will list a number of different business types. Once you choose the one that best serves your company and its products, you’ll be able to download the sample data feed most relevant to your business.
Based on the business type, you have downloaded the feed template, now it’s time to make custom changes is the sample spreadsheet to make it valuable for you.
Here is an example of a data feed:
Whenever you make changes or update your data feed, you always want to double-check your work. It’s easy to accidentally put information into the wrong column or row. Not only can this cause Google to reject your data feed, but it can also make for some embarrassing blunders in your Dynamic Display Ad messages!
You want to pay particular attention to the price of each item. Is it the same price that is listed on your website? Discrepancies between your data feed and your website are the most common reason to have your data feed disapproved by Google.
You should dedicate an extra chunk of time towards reviewing the images in your data feed. Every product image needs to be in the right place in your spreadsheet for the same reason that each attribute needs to also be in its designated spot.
However, marketers need to be extra careful with their images because of the restrictions and requirements that Google places on these assets.
Approved Image Formats: PNG, JPG, JPEG and GIF.
Approved Image Sizes: Image files cannot be larger than 11.4 MB (approximately 6 million pixels). The image should fit a size ratio of 300 pixels by 300 pixels at 72 DPI.
If images are missing or malfunctioning in your data feed, then your products will be unavailable for Google Dynamic Display Ads. It can also occur if it takes too long for Google to reach the image URL. If this is the case, you may need to check your website’s speed and permissions.
Reviewing is very important, you must read the policies, if you are using addresses in a feed, use proper format provided by Google Ads. If you don’t fix the violations, please remove your ad to prevent your account from becoming suspended in the future for having too many disapproved ads.
When you’ve finished updating and reviewing your data feed, you can name and save the file. Then follow the same process to download the sample spreadsheet.
You’re now ready to choose this data feed and begin creating Dynamic Display Ads as already mentioned in the start of this part of the blog.
There are some cases where a well-formatted data feed is still disapproved by Google. This can happen when a Google Ads policy is broken.
Here are the few most common examples:
Adult Content: Google wants to keep its content safe for all users and that includes ad content. For this reason, Google prohibits the marketing and advertising of adult-themed products. This includes firearms and explosives, drugs and tobacco, gambling products, and more.
Trademarks: You are responsible for any trademarked content in your data feed. If there are disputes regarding trademark ownership of content in your data feed, Google may deny your feed and pause your Dynamic Display Ads until the issue is resolved.
Relevance: The information and products in your data feed need to be relevant to the items in your catalog and to your business itself. Traits that are not relevant to the products or products that don’t fit with your business type may cause Google to question the legitimacy of your offerings. For example, if your business sells luxury soaps and there is a car model included in your data feed.
Counterfeit: This violation not only can disapprove your ad but can also lead to your account suspension. Google consider counterfeit violation very seriously. Google takes a comprehensive view of your online footprint to ensure you aren’t misrepresenting your brand.
Don’t go into Dynamic Display Ads unprepared. You should have a clear idea of what this ad format offers to your business and how you can use it to generate better results than your existing, static display advertisements. It is observed that retail industry taking much advantage of this and have seen the 3 times more traffic with this implementation.
They realized return on investment went double comparing to normal display campaigns. Not only the previously visited visitors came again and again even new sessions (those who never visited before) made more than 50% increase in users. So if the online retail store can achieve a success with dynamic display ads then why not you?
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