Dynamic Search Ads for E-Commerce in 2021

It’s been a long time since dynamic search ads first appeared a decade ago. Thanks to technological advances in machine learning, they’ve become an impressive marketing tool for all businesses that can reap impressive returns. 

Businesses with large product inventories, in particular, may see more benefits than most from this type of campaign. This is great news for e-commerce companies looking to up their Google Ads game.

We’re giving you the ultimate guide on everything you need to know about dynamic search ads for e-commerce.

What Are Dynamic Search Ads?

There are three main varieties of Google Ads — search ads, display ads, and video ads. Within each of these ad types, there are different campaign options. Dynamic search ads (DSA) is one of many ad campaign options for search ads.

If you know anything about search ads, it’s that they’re keyword-based. Right?

Well, as it turns out… not always. Dynamic search ads are a campaign option that doesn’t use keywords. It might sound magical to not have to spend hours of your time doing keyword research for your campaign. But as usual, it’s all down to a clever Google algorithm.

We also weren’t exactly honest by saying it doesn’t use keywords at all. It does, because how else would it match your ads to eyes? What Google actually does is crawl the content on your website instead of you manually entering keywords for your ad campaign.

Once Google’s crawlers have run through your content, an algorithm matches that content with queries. Google then auto-populates an ad personalized to that query, linking to a page on your website it thinks matches the query best.

Dynamic search ads actually look eerily similar to regular search ads. By regular search ads, we mean the ones that appear at the top of search results pages. The headlines aren’t usually as “salesy” as the typical ad copy you might see.

This is because Google tends to populate the headline with the exact search query words used by pulling them from your site. For example, say I was searching for “be there in a prosecco” OPI nail polish. A dynamic research ad might include the specific long-tail phrasing I used when I searched.

This personalization makes it an incredibly powerful campaign type in the right hands.

History of Dynamic Search Ads

As we mention in the introduction, dynamic search ads first appeared way back in 2011. So they’re not new by any means. However, they have very much reinvented themselves since their first appearance on the Google Ads platform.

DSA used to work by simply crawling your site and indexing your information. Nowadays, the clever bots at Google categorize all the different pages of your site based on your products or services.

It’s very fancy, but all this really means is better targeting for your campaigns. It also gives you more control. This was a common complaint of the initial DSA format.

There’s increased transparency, so you can see how your DSA campaigns are performing. This means you can select the pages that queries may lead to, as well as example queries that might trigger your ad to appear.

This transparency also extends to bidding strategies. Recommending bidding wasn’t added until much later on. But it helps you market your campaigns far more effectively, as it’s based on the performance of existing keywords.

Difference Between Dynamic Search Ads and Responsive Search Ads

A common mix-up we’ll take a moment to clear up here is between dynamic search ads and responsive search ads. They’re both an automated campaign option under the overall search ad type, so it’s understandable people get them confused.

Responsive search ads are a great tool as well. This campaign option lets you create flexible ads that can adapt to show more text, more relevant copy, and more.

But responsive ads take up a lot of time in creating different headlines and description copy to mix and match to create the ads that appear. Whereas for dynamic search ads, the advertiser doesn’t have to write any headlines at all.

To make matters more confusing, responsive search ads are also frequently confused with expanded text ads (ETA). These ads allow for an extra line for your headline and description. It’s dependent on the device as to whether the additional ad copy will be displayed.

All of the ad types have their pros and cons and can work well for different businesses. But for e-commerce companies with a lot of product pages, responsive search ads and expanded text ads can be an extremely time confusing affair.

Meanwhile, dynamic search ads are in a unique position to help certain e-commerce businesses.

Dynamic Search Ads for E-Commerce

We mentioned the time-saving benefits above, but they cannot be understated. For e-commerce owners who have vast amounts of product pages, dynamic search ads can be a real lifesaver. Instead of having to do swathes of keyword research for each new product, dynamic search ads do the hard work for you.

This said, for site owners who want to keep control over every aspect of a campaign, DSAs might not be for you.

For DSAs to work best for your e-commerce business, you’ll need rich content. This is because Google needs to be able to understand your pages to best match them with queries. Rich content also means Google’s algorithm has plenty of options for generating your headline and keywords.

Not only are dynamic search ads great for companies with a large product inventory, but if your inventory is frequently changing, this is even truer. Instead of having to conduct fresh keyword research for new products, you can let Google’s algorithm do the hard work for you.

If these aspects sound like your e-commerce business, then dynamic search ads might have some big benefits beyond just saving time.

Pros and Cons of Dynamic Search Ads

As with all things, there are pros and cons to DSA campaigns. We’ll start with the good news.

It’s Easier

This ties in nicely with the time-saving benefit mentioned above, but the campaigns are much easier to set up because of it.

Google automates so much of the process, so your time can be better spent on other aspects of the campaign (or other campaigns altogether)!

Cover More Keywords

Every business will be guilty of missing out on some keywords. It’s bound to happen when it’s estimated around 70% of searches are from long-tail keywords.

DSA is impressive when it comes to closing the gap in keyword coverage. This is because it runs through your site content to get the closest match.

You might be surprised once you’ve got a campaign up and running at how many high-performing keywords you discover that you’d missed. You can mine this information to optimize other active campaigns and future campaigns.

Increased KPIs

If your KPIs revolve around increasing traffic and ROI, dynamic search ads can seriously pull their weight. Many brands swear by it, such as travel giant Trivago.

Automated Updates

Giving up control of your ad campaign to a machine can feel a little odd, to say the least. Fortunately, Google has a great little automated update feature you can enable for DSA campaigns. So you’re in the loop as much as you want to be.

But with all these benefits, come the downfalls.

Content Dependent

The vast majority of e-commerce sites know the importance of rich content for online businesses. Rich content is vital for dynamic search ads to work well. If the quality of your site content is poor, the quality of your ads will suffer.

There are some poor examples from businesses where the headline Google has created is in no way related to the content on-page. This is most likely because the content is of poor quality or lacking in optimization.

Lack of Control

One of the great things about Google Ads is that it allows you to get your brand voice out there. If you’ve got a great brand voice that you’ve worked hard to be consistent on, dynamic search ads can put a dent in this.

While customers are unlikely to care, if witty ad copy is your pride and joy, a DSA campaign can dampen your spirits.

Increased Ad Spend

If you don’t know what you’re doing, a DSA campaign can burn a hole in your pocket.

We don’t mean it will run completely awry and over-budget. But it can waste a lot of money on targeting the wrong queries if you don’t follow best practices when setting up your campaign.

Fortunately, that won’t happen to you. We’re here to guide you through exactly how to set up a dynamic search ad campaign.

DSA Page Feeds

If you’re setting up your first dynamic search ad campaign, there’s some behind-the-scenes work you can do first. This is through DSA page feeds, or product feeds.

It can all sound a little complicated, but it’s simple once you’ve got your head around it. DSA page feeds are where you upload a list of URLs from your site that are okay for Google to include in DSA campaigns. You can do this using Excel, Google Sheets, and more.

It’s to help save time in the long run. It means when setting up campaigns you’re not going through excluding multiple pages, as they’re irrelevant. It lets you handpick which pages you want your DSA campaigns to focus on.

You don’t have to do this to run a DSA campaign, you can run one without. However, for large e-commerce businesses, we’d highly recommend this option. If you have more than 5,000 SKUs or you’re regularly making product changes and updates, you’ll thank yourself later for doing it before.

This is because a feed-based DSA setup means you aren’t constantly having to manually exclude individual pages later on from campaigns.

How to Set Up DSA Page Feeds

First, you need to go to the business data section within your Google Ads account. To find this, click on the tools icon and then set up. You’ll find the business data link here.

Once you’ve clicked that, select the blue plus (+) symbol and click select page feed. You’ll then choose whether to upload your file or a template. Once you’ve uploaded, Google will crawl through your file.

Pro tip: If you’ve got a lot of pages, you can use a custom labels column to organize them into digestible chunks.

Once this is uploaded and crawled, you can move onto setting up DSA campaigns.

How to Set Up a Google Dynamic Search Ad Campaign

Initially, setting up a DSA campaign isn’t much different from setting up any other search campaign. They all start in the campaigns section of your Google Ads account.

Log into your Google Adwords account and navigate to campaigns on the left. Once you’re there, select a new campaign within the search network.

You’ll then through the similar steps you would for any other campaign. This includes setting your goals, entering your URL, and naming your campaign. It will also let you select your campaign location, bid strategy, and bid limit.

You can go back and change all this later, so don’t worry too much for now. Once you’ve done all this, expand the additional settings. Here you’ll find the dynamic search ads option.

Click it and check the box next to enable dynamic. Once you’ve saved it, you can go on to create your ad groups. Within each ad group, there should now be a ‘dynamic ads’ tab which is where you can set your target options.

Once you’ve set your target (more on this and bidding strategies in a moment), all you have to do is create the ad. To do this, click ‘new ad’ and enter your description text.

And you’re done. Yes, it really is that easy.

If you didn’t use set up DSA page feeds though, you’ll also need to exclude pages.

Which Pages to Exclude

All websites have pages that aren’t of value for ad campaigns. Generally speaking for e-commerces, there are four kinds of pages on your site you should definitely exclude on a DSA campaign.

Both blogs and information-based pages like about us or contact us pages should be excluded. You should exclude any out-of-stock products, as well as any products, brands, or categories you don’t want to advertise.

Overall, you want to focus on your product pages and landing pages for the best campaign results.

Dynamic Search Ad Bid Strategies

You should already be familiar with the bid strategies available for dynamic search ads if you’ve used Google Ads before.

The bidding strategies run on a cost-per-click system, just like other search ads. The cost is determined by taking the number of clicks your ad gets. Then multiply that by the maximum cost per click limit you’ve set for your campaign.

For regular search ad campaigns, you’d be bidding on keywords. This isn’t the case for dynamic search ads. Bids are applied at an auto-target level.

You can however change this to manual bidding if you want. So for all those who like to be in firm control of their budget, you can breathe a sigh of relief. You can find the manual bidding option under additional settings then advanced options.

There’s also smart bidding available. This is a variation of automated bidding. Smart bidding uses machine learning to help increase conversions.

It essentially does the work of figuring out what maximum CPC you should use, so you don’t have to. It optimizes your campaigns to improve their performance, usually much faster than a person could.

There’s also target cost per acquisition bidding. As the name suggests, this bidding strategy focuses on acquisitions as opposed to clicks. It auto-optimizes bids and tailors them for auction to achieve this.

The final bid strategy is target return on ad spend, also known as ROAS. This bid strategy lets you place bids that are auto-optimized to hit a certain return on investment.

There’s no right or wrong bidding strategy. It all depends on what you’re hoping to achieve or what your goals are. In fact, it’s often a good idea to try several different bid strategies to see which works best for your business.

This said, for beginners to Google Ads and even dynamic search ads, start with smart bidding. This takes any guesswork out of it and ensures you’re using your budget best based on the data.

Dynamic Search Ads Targeting

Even with a great bid strategy, without great targeting, your DSA campaign won’t see the results you want.

Targeting your dynamic search ads is vital to ensure they land in front of the right users. You’ll also need well-written copy on site for Google to pull into your ad for a good click-through-rate.

Dynamic search ads don’t have the same targeting options as regular search ads. This is because it’s all based on the content of the page. There are three targeting options we’ll look at.

Categories

Category targeting involves Google pre-selecting categories based on your website content. You can also control this if you prefer.

For example, you could target a DSA campaign to use only your landing pages from your ad groups. Your dynamic search ads would then only be served for queries relevant to those pages.

URLs

You can also just select specific webpages to target via URLs. You have complete control over this and you can go broad or narrow. It gives you precise control over your campaign.

For broader matches, you can target using the ‘URL contains’ option. This lets you target all pages within a certain destination on your site. This is great for targeting products within a certain category.

For more specific targeting, you can use the ‘URL is’ option. This allows you to target exact URLs on your website. It’s an excellent option to let you get hyper-specific with your targeting.

Instead of URLs, you can also opt to target based on page title or page content. If you have well-structured URLs, the results should be fairly similar. But it’s a great option for businesses where this may not be the case.

All Webpages

Also known as a catch-all campaign, ‘all webpages’ targeting gets Google to do the leg work for your campaign. Google will run through all your site pages other than those you excluded.

This is a great option for Google Ads beginners or those new to dynamic search ads. It can catch many keywords you’ve missed, particularly long-tail queries you’d never have thought of.

This said, if you are using a catch-all campaign, you need to ensure you set your bids low. This is because it will stop DSA from monopolizing traffic from your existing search campaigns.

Breaking Up Campaigns

You’re probably at the point where you’re wondering how exactly to split up all these campaigns.

If you already have an established Google Ads account, running a standard DSA campaign alongside it is a great idea. There’s minimal work to set it up if you use smart bidding and catch-all targeting.

For starting out, we would advise you to build different campaigns for each product category. If you’re trialing different targeting options, break each type of dynamic ad targeting into a different ad group.

Alternatively, you can set up DSA in an entirely new Google Ads account. It’s a clean slate, so to speak.

You can also set up dynamic search ads for RLSA, YouTube, and Affinity Audiences. We’ll cover them all.

DSA for YouTube

Dynamic search ads work great for YouTube. This is unsurprising, considering they’re a Google-owned site.

If your e-commerce business has a YouTube account, a DSA video campaign is a great way to get eyes on your videos. You can select your most popular videos about your products. Google will put them in front of users looking for related queries on YouTube.

Affinity and In-Market Audiences

If you have an established Google Ads account, you can also create a campaign based on affinity or in-market audiences.

Affinity audiences are users who may be interested in your product or brand based on their lifestyle and interests. Google creates these audiences based on demographic and psychographic data on your audience.

You can also set up custom affinity audiences. This lets you add specific interests, URLs, locations, and apps. It means you can target users who have been on competitor sites and are searching for queries related to your brand or product.

Meanwhile, in-market audiences are people actively researching a product or service similar to yours. Google achieves this by analyzing search history to predict when people may be at a buying point of their research.

Both are excellent for increasing brand awareness. They put your ads in front of users who may never have seen or heard of your brand otherwise.

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads

If you’ve never heard of remarketing before, then you’re missing out on some seriously profitable campaigns.

Also known as retargeting, remarketing is targeting users who have already visited your e-commerce site. There are two main ways to do this when it comes to DSA campaigns.

First, you can solely use your DSA campaigns for remarketing. It will limit your campaign reach, but it may increase conversions because of the hyper-specific targeting. Alternatively, you can create a standard DSA campaign and add remarketing within the campaign.

How to Set Up RLSA on Google Ads

To set up either remarketing campaign, there’s some backend work you need to do first. As you’re using Google Ads and Google Analytics, you should already have the Google global site tag.

But for dynamic remarketing, you’ll also need the event snippet. This snippet retains data like the product ID that specific users viewed. It tells the global site tag when it needs to send more in-depth remarketing data, allowing Google to show customized ads to users.

It sounds complicated, but it’s easy to set up. Start by clicking the tools icon within your Google Ads platform, then shared library, then audience manager.

From here go to the page menu on the left and find audience sources. Within this, you’ll find the Google Ads tag card and select ‘set up tag’. If you’ve already done this (which you should have!), you can amend your tag for remarketing by clicking the three-dot icon and then edit.

Once you’ve done this, choose “collect specific attributes or parameters to personalize ads”. From here you’ll set up your dynamic remarketing. You’ll need to select the business types that best match your products or services.

Then you should see a tag set up option. Select install. You can then choose whether to install the tag yourself, email it to your web developer, or use Google Tag Manager (GTM).

If you’re DIYing it, copy the code and add it between the <head> tags of your site. Unlike the global site tag, the event snippet only needs to be on specific pages of your site. This would generally include your product pages, basket pages, and confirmation pages.

Setting up an RDSA Campaign

Once you have the right tags added to your site, you can add remarketing to your DSA campaigns, also known as an RDSA campaign.

To set this up, head into your Google Ads platform and head to the audiences tab within an ad group. From here, select the “+ remarketing” option, then select your audience from the interests and remarketing section.

Make sure your audience list is set to ‘target and bid’. This will make sure you only target people who’ve already visited your site. A ‘bid only’ target will target anyone.

You may also want to exclude users who have previously converted if your product is not something you would regularly purchase.

You can target specific remarketing lists with certain prerequisites. For example, a user who has been on the site for five or more minutes or who has visited more than three times.

For e-commerce businesses that thrive on regular returning customers, you can also target previous buyers. You can get super specific with this too by targeting people who have spent a certain amount or purchased a specific product. It’s an incredible tool for creating a loyal customer base.

Whatever you decide to set up as your remarketing targeting, let it run for a while before you analyze its success. We would recommend a couple of weeks as a minimum.

Best Practices for DSA Campaigns

Now you know how to set up both a standard dynamic search ad campaign, as well as a dynamic search ad remarketing campaign. That’s half the battle, but you also want them to do well. To do that you need to understand best practices.

Generally speaking, best practices apply to both standard DSA and RDSA campaigns. Especially when it comes to negative keywords.

Negative Keywords

If you’re running a Google Ads account already, you should have a negative keywords list.

A negative keywords list is just what it sounds like. It’s keywords you don’t want your keywords to appear with.

In case you’re not familiar, we’ll use an example to explain. Let’s say you sell luxury candles with a high price point. You might include the word “cheap” in your negative keywords list.

This is because you know users searching for cheap candles won’t be interested in your high price point product, even if they click on your ad. So it’s wasting your campaign budget to include this query.

It’s super important to have a strong negative keywords list for your DSA campaign. This will stop it from overlapping with your current ad groups. It means you won’t have two campaigns essentially bidding against each other.

It’s not as vital for RDSA campaigns unless you’ve set your targeting to ‘bid only’. In this case, you’ll be bidding against your own keywords on other campaigns. This is why we strongly advise using the other targeting option.

Update Site Content

We’ve spoken about how you should have rich content on your pages for the best results from a DSA campaign. But as your DSA campaigns run, you should also be looking at the keywords you realize you’ve missed and adding these to your content.

You can find these keywords easily once your campaign is up and running. Go to the campaign you’d like to find search terms for and click dynamic ad targets on the left-hand menu. Then select search terms.

You’ll be able to toggle between three reports here. You can either see how your campaign is performing by search terms alone, landing page alone, or by search terms and landing page. We’d suggest looking at the latter report when you’re looking for new keywords to add to your pages.

Have a Great Description

DSA campaigns are so appealing as there’s so little copy to craft. But this can also be a downfall, as the only copy you get is your description line. What we’re saying is you’ve only got 80 characters to make it work, so use it wisely.

The best practices here are the same best practices that apply to all search ads. This means addressing your audience directly in the second person singular with you, your, and so on.

You should also address known pain points that will resonate with your audience and use figures and statistics wherever possible.

Most of all, you should be trialing these descriptions to see which works best for your audience. While it’s good guidance, best practice doesn’t apply to every industry. So figure out what your audience actually likes and craft the perfect ad based on data.

Go Global

For e-commerce businesses with an international customer base, set up DSA campaigns to target each language.

Not only will your campaign reach more people by targeting different locations, but it will be personalized to your user’s language. This should increase your click-through-rate significantly.

Accurate Info

One of the downfalls of DSA is that you need to be on the ball with up-to-date information. This can be a problem for large e-commerce sites, which is why we would suggest using page feeds for those businesses.

If your product information isn’t up to date, your ads will be appearing in front of the wrong users. Or users will be clicking on your ad and not finding what they want. Either way, it’s a huge waste of your campaign budget.

Keeping your information accurate and up to date avoids this.

Clear CTA

If you’ve done everything else right, users should be clicking on your ad. Once they get onto your site, they need to find a strong and clear call to action waiting for them.

Without this, you’ll see poor conversation rates despite a well-performing campaign.

Good Website Structure

It should be apparent by now, but in case it isn’t, a good website structure is key to a DSA campaign that performs. This is why e-commerce sites with a strong website structure match so well with DSA campaigns.

Let’s assume you’ve already followed our advice and exclude all the pages you needed to, whether by page feeds or within individual campaigns. If you have multiple pages ranking for the same keyword, Google is going to struggle to figure out which page to serve for your ad.

This can lead to some seriously under-performing campaigns in the long run. So before you set anything up, ensure you have a good hierarchical website structure where pages aren’t competing against each other.

Good Headlines

You don’t have control over the headlines for DSA ads. But you absolutely have control over the content of your page, which is where they’re pulled from.

They’re quite often pulled from your page title. So if your page title is some long-winded product ID, change it immediately. Your page titles should be descriptive and interesting for the best results.

Experiments 

A great feature within Google ads is the experiments feature. Not enough businesses use it in our humble opinion!

This feature lets you A/B test every aspect of your campaign. You can test pretty much anything you can think of. But for your DSA campaigns, we’d suggest starting by testing your bidding strategies and descriptions.

You shouldn’t be doing this until you’ve let a campaign run for a significant amount of time, so around a month minimum. Otherwise, you’ll have insufficient data to compare against.

Seasonal or Promotions

Because DSA campaigns are so easy to set up, this makes them a great option for busy e-commerce sites that have regular seasonal offers or promotions.

All you need to do here is create a DSA campaign, set smart bidding, and target the specific URL offering the promotion. Then let Google find your audience for you.

It may also be worth adding negative keywords to avoid clashing with current campaigns. But even then, it’s far less work than setting up a temporary campaign would usually offer!

Go Pro With Ad Customizers

Ad customizers are another clever option to take your campaign to the next level. You can use them in any search ad. You’d usually use them in the headline of your ad, but they can be just as powerful in the description copy.

Customizers do what they say on the tin, they custom your ad. You can use this to perfectly match user queries and add a custom CTA, add a countdown to a promotional offer, and target messaging to devices.

Google Dynamic Search Ads: Go Try It Yourself

We know, it’s been a long one and you probably have an acute case of information overload!

The best way to learn how to use dynamic search ads is to give them a try and see how they can benefit your e-commerce business. Remember to use our guide to ensure you don’t waste your budget or overlap with your current campaigns.

If you need help scaling your e-commerce, we’re here for you. We can help you streamline your site across advertising platforms, simplifying the process and saving you time and money.

Get in touch to book a demo.