Overhaul Of Google’s Dynamic Search Ads Launches Globally

During the Inside AdWords event earlier this spring, Google announced that Dynamic Search Ads was getting a reboot. Now, the overhauled interface has become available globally to all advertisers.

With Dynamic Search Ads (DSA), Google automatically generates text ads for inclusion in an auction based on a website’s content as opposed to the keywords that are input into a campaign. Google creates the headline and ad copy and also chooses the landing page based on a crawl of a website.

The concept is that DSA can be used to cover advertisers’ bases for keywords that aren’t already included in their marketing campaigns. These may be low-volume queries or location-oriented searches that use “near me” or “nearby,” which have doubled in the past year, according to Google Trends data.

Dynamic Search Ads have always relied on crawling and indexing site content, but what’s new is that they now also create categories of a website’s content for ad targeting. A dealership can choose to select the option to “Use categories recommended for your website” to see the way that Google has categorized the products on their site. In the following example, there is a Furniture category which is then sub-categorized by “dining room furniture,” “bedroom furniture,” and so on.

One of the primary reasons for Google’s change is that the keywords people use to conduct daily searches continue to change, and people often search differently for the same thing.

“Of the billions of searches made on Google every day, 15 percent of them have never been seen before,” wrote Jen Huang, senior product manager at Google AdWords. “Couple that with shifting product inventory and content hidden deep within your website, and people don’t always find what they’re looking for.”

Although some may see the redesign of Dynamic Search Ads as reducing their control in comparison to selecting specific product pages, targeting by category can save setup time or expand on the DSA targeting that you’re already doing, which could be advantageous for many dealerships. The rebuilt tool allows marketers to preview and control how their ads will serve up, and also provides them with an example of search queries that will trigger the advertisement. Google will provide a recommended bid based on the performance of existing keywords, and it will prompt the ad to target similar queries.

The following Google video provides an overview of how it works: