Have you heard of “Keyword-less” campaigns? Read our article to understand how these campaigns work and how they can be useful to you.
About Dynamic Search Ads
Dynamic Search Ads is a functionality of Google Ads that allows you to generate campaigns that do not contain any keywords and only use the content of your site to target your ads to specific audiences and make them appear in relevant queries. In other words, Dynamic Search Ads uses the content of your website’s pages to create ads.
When a user does a Google search on a term related to a title or a common phrase present on your site, Google Ads uses that title or phrase to select a landing page on your site, and then to generate a clear and relevant title. Meaning that the final text that Google will display in your ad depends entirely on the landing page selected. You should therefore take this into consideration when you are setting up your campaign.
Advantages and disadvantages of DSA campaigns
The advantages:
- Save time: You no longer need to match keywords, actions and ad texts to each product on your website.
- Increase your traffic and broaden your audience: these campaigns identify new opportunities that your keywords are perhaps not yet targeting.
- Drive performance: when your product or service matches with a customer’s search, Google Ads dynamically generates an ad with a clear title pointing to the most relevant page on your website. These ads generate traffic and therefore additional sales because they promote your business to a larger number of users than keyword-targeted campaigns do.
- Control your campaigns: you can run ads based on your entire website, or else on specific pages or sections of your site. You can also choose remove unavailable products in your ads, either temporarily or permanently.
- Dynamic Search Ads work well as a compliment to your existing keyword-based campaigns: As users search, they usually start looking for long tail keywords that you may not have included in your Google Ads account. These keywords are used when users are close to their goal and approaching the buying phase. Dynamic Search Ads allows you to get more clicks and conversions for less effort.
Disadvantages:
- Need to have a well-structured website: your pages must be semantically rich.
- High segmentation: you have to segment by category / URL / page content / title.
- Analysis time: the analysis of the Dynamic Search Ad (DSA) campaign and the optimization of the campaign is time-consuming.
- It’s a “budget eater“: if there is no analysis and optimization.
Setting up a DSA campaign
The implementation of DSA in Google Ads is simple and relatively similar to a classic Google Ad set up. All you have to do is go to the “Campaigns” section in the menu before clicking on “+” and then click “New Campaign”. Then, by setting up your ad group, you can select the option “Dynamic Search” or “Dynamic Ads”.
DSA campaigns are essentially based on targeting content instead of keywords. It is therefore essential, when configuring your campaign, to select the content that Google will use for the automatic generation of your ads. This can be done in several different ways, including the following:
- By indicating URLs: this option allows you to find suggestions for quality campaigns.
- By asking the search engine to generate categories automatically from your content: this will provide you with insight on specific targeting based on your content. Clearly giving you an idea as to what topics you should base your ads on.
- By targeting all pages: this option allows you to target all your content by analyzing all keywords and targeting cheaper long tail Google queries.
DSA campaigns should not be created when:
- You make frequent changes to your site.
- Your website is linked to certain activities such as: gambling, pharmaceuticals or adult products and content.
- The format of your site is not usable by Google Ads. That is to say, your website content is not optimized to allow the identification of terms and themes used by dynamic ads in the search network.
Choosing the type of targeting
You can choose from different targeting options to tell the ads which landing pages to use:
- URL_Equals: This option allows you to target individual URLs on your website.