Are you looking to boost the clicks on your search engine marketing? Utilizing Google’s Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) might be a great way to breathe new life into your SEM campaigns. These ads are powered by Google’s AI to share relevant ads to a broader range of search terms. Sound interesting? Let’s take a closer look at how DSAs work and their pros and cons to see if they’d be a good fit to enhance your SEM strategy.
What Are Dynamic Search Ads?
Dynamic Search Ads are a type of text search ad offered by Google. Instead of serving based on a list of keywords you provide, Google crawls your website to see what types of products and content you offer and then uses their artificial intelligence (AI) to pull your ads for search terms it recognizes are related to your site. On the results pages, DSAs look identical to traditional search ads, so consumers won’t be able to detect a difference. Additionally, Google writes custom headlines for each ad using information pulled from your site to best match the user’s search term. You will still need to provide several description lines that will be selected to pair with your dynamic ads.
Dynamic Search Ads let you set parameters on which parts of your site you want Google to crawl and what to create ads from. You can choose certain categories, landing pages, or let them crawl your entire site.
The Benefits
It’s hard to predict what people will do. Building ads on a list of keywords is great, but inevitably there will be relevant searches that fall through the cracks. Dynamic Search Ads aim to help fill these cracks for you by serving your ads on keyword searches you might not have anticipated and giving you broader ad coverage. In this way, DSAs can be a great add-on to the classic search ads you already have running.
Since Google will automatically generate a headline for dynamic ads based on the search term, the resulting ads can seem very personalized to the user. Ads that more closely align with the user’s search term often receive higher click rates than ads that seem less relevant.
Another benefit of Dynamic Search Ads is that they are easy to set up and manage. This is especially helpful for companies with a large catalog of products to advertise. You can let DSAs scan your product categories, and all you have to set up are description lines and bids. With less to write and no keyword research, you can start a new dynamic search campaign quickly and easily.
The Drawbacks
Like with all things, there are a few drawbacks you might want to consider before incorporating Dynamic Search Ads into your SEM. The biggest drawback for many marketers is that you lose a level of control over your ads. Since AI writes the headlines, they might not always be the best fit or make the most sense for your brand. Google generally does a good job, but oddities do occur from time to time. If you have tight brand standards, this might not work well for you. To help mitigate a mismatch issue, make sure to closely monitor your ads for the first few days so you can review and ensure everything looks optimal.
Another potential drawback is that your ads could be spending a lot of money but aren’t serving to an accurate audience. Help guide the AI before that becomes a problem by using negative keywords. Think of any way that your products or categories might be misinterpreted and add a list of negative keywords to exclude those misunderstandings. It’s also good to keep a close eye on your campaigns and tweak as you go to make sure they are working smoothly and in your favor.
What’s the Consensus?
Overall, Dynamic Search Ads are a great fit for a variety of businesses and situations such as e-commerce companies who sell a lot of products or anyone who is finding that their manual campaigns are becoming time consuming and difficult to manage. The way each ad is personalized to the search performed often improves click-through rates, and for that reason, we think they’re worth the experiment for most businesses. Much of marketing and advertising is experimentation, so why not try a couple dynamic ads for a few months and see what happens to your KPIs?
If you’d like help with your SEM strategy, including adding dynamic ads to the mix, start a conversation with our team today. We can help you improve your digital strategy so it starts to generate real results.