Taking Another Look At DSA Campaigns

So you’ve built out thousands, maybe even millions, of keywords in your PPC campaigns but your client still wants to expand the scale of the account, but you’re thinking… WHAT ELSE DO I DO?! First take a deep breath, and then consider taking another look at Google dynamic search ad (DSA) campaigns.

DSA campaigns match search queries to your site based on the content, and because Google crawls the site you don’t have to come up with or maintain keyword lists for every product on your site. They also auto-populate parts of the ad for you. How great is this?!

I was always skeptical of dynamic insertion anything and just recently started using DSA campaigns for one of my clients, and I have already seen an 8% incremental lift in conversions week over week. I have also seen an increase in conversion rates by becoming more granular and sending people to more specific landing pages, without having to build out ads and keywords for almost a thousand URLs. This type of large scale expansion with DSA has become possible because Google recently added a bulk function in Adwords Editor. It allows you upload the dynamic targeting ads in bulk.

So fast forward to Adwords Editor and you can start setting up fancy DSA the same as any other search network campaigns, ad groups, and ad extensions. What makes them different are the targeting and the ads.

Earlier I mentioned how DSA campaigns populate part of the ad for you, and by that I mean they populate the headline and landing URL. Let’s start with the other parts.  In an excel sheet fill out the description line 1, description line 2, the display URL, and the dynamic landing URL. Then upload them by adding/ updating multiple dynamic search ads. The dynamic landing URL depends on which pages of your site you let Google land them (they will pick the most relevant of the options you set up).

Uploading the targeting is the same process as the ads, but what is dynamic search targeting? Google can either crawl the entire site or there are four parameters you can set up and the google will match similar content of your site to relevant queries. Which group you use depends on the structure of your site.

You can go back and see what queries the DSA campaigns are matching to by looking in the search term details on the keyword tab in Adwords.

So now you should be ready to scale the account quickly and easier than traditional keyword builds, but don’t worry I won’t tell your clients if you don’t tell mine.