Say you’re a small business that has quite a few products for sale on your website. You want to promote your products via Google AdWords and you start to learn what that will take. You do some keyword research and start breaking out all the different variations into tightly themed ad groups. You then begin writing 2-3 ads for each ad group so that you can test ad messaging. You also create a few relevant sitelinks, add call extensions & add callout extensions. You create your campaigns, set your budgets and turn it all on. A couple issues become apparent quickly:
- In some areas, expensive keywords exhaust the daily budget in a handful of clicks.
- In other ad groups you see notifications about low volume and impressions (let alone clicks) accrue very slowly.
Given the limited budget and the large array of products, very little data will accrue and very few optimizations can be made. Our small business owner is justifiably frustrated because she feels like she followed best practices and did things the “right way.”
Enter Dynamic Search Ads
Dynamic Search Ads offer an alternative that saves time while giving up a minimum of control (PPC professionals are notorious control freaks, so if you feel the hair on the back of your neck standing up while reading this please step away from the keyboard, do 10 squats, get a drink, and come back in 3 minutes).
How It Works
To create a campaign for Dynamic Search Ads you create a search only campaign and then choose the radio button for Dynamic Search Ads:
The rest of the targeting options will be the same as your regular search campaigns and the next major difference will be on ads. You’ll notice during ad creation that the headline is being dynamically generated based on page content. So focus on writing 2 really good lines of ad copy in the body.
Next you’ll need to define what pages of your site are the campaign/ad group will be looking at for targeting. You can select based on the four options below:
Pro Tip: You can also exclude if certain words are present, like “Out of Stock” so that you’re not advertising for products you don’t have available.
Summary
In short, if you’re an AdWords advertiser with a fair number of products, have a limited budget, and need to save time then Dynamic Search Ads can be a great tool for you. If you have questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below.
