By Volusion
Are you interested in taking your PPC campaign to the next level with Dynamic Search Ads? One of our specialists walks you through the benefits and pitfalls.
Dynamic Search Ads can be a great addition to your PPC account. They can save you time and allow all of your products to appear before the eyes of shopping customers. However, if set up incorrectly and not managed properly, they can also spend money taking customers to sub-optimal areas of your site. Let’s breakdown what these ads are, why it can be beneficial to use them and mistakes to avoid!
What are Dynamic Search Ads?
Dynamic Search Ads are an alternative way to target your ads to the Search Network. While standard text ads use keywords to determine when they show up on Google Search, Dynamic Search Ads differ in that they don’t use keywords. Instead, they automatically show based on the content of your website.
Dynamic Search Ads Benefits:
They can save you time
With Dynamic Search Ads, there is no need to map out keywords, bids and ads to each product on your website. The content on your category and product pages does the work for you. This means the work you’ve put in building your site, labeling your products, and writing product and category descriptions pays dividends not only when Google crawls your site organically but now in the paid search realm too!
They can show more relevant ads
When a customer’s search is relevant to a product in your store, Google will dynamically generate an ad headline that includes words from that customer’s search and the respective landing page. Dynamic Search Ads can also generate headlines that are longer than that of standard search ads (no more 25 character limits!), giving your ad more visibility on the search engine.
You can be in complete control of which pages to take customers
Dynamic Search Ads show based on the criteria you set in the ad group, which means you have complete control in terms of how you want to set it up. For example: If you want to advertise all pages of your site, you can create an ad group for that, If you only want to advertise a certain category page of products or an individual product, you can create ad groups for each of those too. As long as those pages have relevant content and accurate product names, you can expect to see qualified traffic.
They are suitable for a constantly-changing product line
Dynamic Search Ads can be very useful if you are constantly adding and removing products. If you have an ad group targeting all pages of the site and you are constantly adding new products, these pages will automatically fall into this ad group and will show ads as soon as google crawls those pages.
Mistakes to avoid when running Dynamic Search Ads
Neglecting negative keywords and exclusions
As with any AdWords campaign, you don’t want to forget to add negative keywords where it’s appropriate but this is especially true for campaigns running Dynamic Search Ads. If your store has products that have extremely low profit margins or they are very inexpensive it would be wise to exclude those pages or keywords from your ad groups. For example, if you are an electronics store and a portion of your store sells USB cords for $2.99 it may not be profitable to advertise for those products where the cost per click on each ad might be a third of what the product costs. Make sure to set up your ad groups to target products and categories of products that will give you a good return on your investment.
Running these ads if your site has minimal content
The important thing to take away here is that Dynamic Search Ads aren’t meant for every store. As stated earlier, Dynamic Search Ads pull from the content on various pages of your site, and if your site has little content on product and category pages there’s a lesser chance you’ll achieve the results you seek. The more relevant and specific information you can put on your product pages the better!
Generic ads
Google automatically fills in the headline and creates a destination url for the ad, which means description lines 1 and 2 are created manually. When creating ads be sure to write text that could pertain to any item that gets pulled into an ad. For example: if you have an ad group targeting all pages of the site, then the ad text would have to be something generic like this:
You wouldn’t want an ad to show for a silver BMX bike when the text you’ve written for ads in that ad group reads something to the effect of: Browse Our Huge Selection of Mountain Bikes. When you set up each ad group, think about any possible product that would fit into the criteria you set and write the ads accordingly!
Final takeaways
Campaigns running Dynamic Search Ads are meant to run alongside standard search ads and essentially pick up traffic that slips through the cracks of your keyword targeted ad groups. Dynamic Search Ads not only bring in quality traffic, but they also serve as a great resource for keyword and landing page data. When going through the reports you can see individual keyword and landing page data, and in turn build out more targeted ad groups based on that data!
Interested in learning more about creating a more powerful PPC campaign? Join us for our upcoming webinar on the 17th.
– Ryan Noonan, Search Marketing Specialist
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