How to Make the Most out of DSA Campaigns in 2023

Google Dymaic search ads are a great tool to drive performance, and I am going to explain to you what you need to know to master DSA in less than 10 minutes

DSA is crucial for business performance; why?

• Increased Efficiency: DSAs use your website content to target your ads and create headlines. This saves time and resources that would have been used to manually select keywords and write ad copy.
• Fill in Gaps of Keyword Campaigns: There might be specific, valuable search terms that your traditional keyword-based campaigns are missing. DSAs help cover these gaps and increase your campaign’s reach.
• Improved Relevance: DSAs automatically match user queries with the content on your website and generate a relevant headline and landing page. This ensures your ads are as pertinent as possible, increasing the chance of engagement.
• Scaling Advertising Efforts: DSAs are particularly beneficial for websites with many products or services. DSAs can automatically generate ads for your entire inventory, making it a scalable solution that grows with your business.
• Dynamic Updates: If your website content changes, DSAs update accordingly. They always reflect your most current offerings, providing up-to-date advertising.
• Performance Optimization: Google's machine learning systems power DSAs. These systems continually learn and improve, optimizing your ads' performance over time.

Unfortunately, most business and performance marketers are not using or utilizing DSA campaigns

Lack of Control is the most reason why DSA is not being Utilized

DSAs rely on Google's algorithms to generate ad copy and select landing pages. This can result in a perceived lack of control, which might be uncomfortable for performance marketers accustomed to carefully crafting their ad copies and curating the landing pages.

Other reasons why DSA is not being utilized:

• Keyword Overlap: Without careful management, DSAs can compete with existing keyword-based campaigns. This can lead to keyword cannibalization, where the DSA and the keyword ad are competing for the same audience, causing marketers to potentially pay more.
• Inadequate Website Content: DSAs require substantial and well-organized content on the website to function effectively. Businesses with limited or poorly structured content may find DSAs less effective.
• Complexity and Misunderstanding: DSAs require a different management approach than traditional keyword-based campaigns. Some performance marketers might avoid DSAs because they don't fully understand how to manage them or fear they're too complex.
• Inappropriate for Certain Businesses: DSAs might not be suitable for all businesses. For instance, businesses with highly regulated or sensitive industries might need stricter control over their ad copy than DSAs allow.

Despite the challenges, there is hope you can run a successful DSA campaign that saves you time and effort and improve your performance at the same time: I am going to explain to you how you can overcome all challenges with DSA and improve your performance.

Here's how, step by step:

Step 1: Determine the suitability of your website for DSA campaigns

Achieving success with Dynamic Search Ads requires ensuring that they are a good fit for your particular needs. In this context, I concur almost entirely with Google's recommended optimal practices for DSA:

The key takeaway here is to ensure your website is rich in relevant text that effectively conveys your business, product, and services, making it discernible by Google's algorithm.

If your website has sparse text, lacks well-structured page titles and meta descriptions, or predominantly depends on imagery, it may be worth reconsidering the use of DSA in your advertising strategy.

Step 2: Grasp how Google Capture your URLs

Many performance marketers overlook how Google capture the URLs for DSA, which lead to choosing the wrong setup!

Use all URLs Google knows about the website plus Page Feeds

This will typically be the go-to choice for any fresh DSA campaign, indicating that any page Google can discover on your website is potential fodder for an ad. While this might seem somewhat daunting, it's generally quite safe to employ.

The best practice, if I decide to use this, I prefer to ensure that I have several pages exempted from my Dynamic Targets within the campaigns:

• About Us
• Terms of Service
• Privacy Policy
• Customer Service Pages
• Blog Pages

While this isn't an all-encompassing list, it should get you started on considering which pages would or wouldn't be suitable for prospective customers to arrive on.

When you feel prepared to eliminate pages from your DSA campaigns, the procedure is fairly straightforward:

Within the Dynamic Ad Targets section, you can formulate a Negative Dynamic Ad Target. This offers you all the same management tools as a standard ad target but is used for excluding pages rather than honing in on specific ones.

Employ the control options that suit your needs to exclude as many pages as possible with ease, whether that involves utilizing Exact URLs or applying rules to limit the number of pages.

Use only URLs from a Page Feed

The alternative option involves utilizing URLs exclusively from Page Feeds you supply.

A Page Feed is simply a CSV file containing the URLs from your site that you want to use for Dynamic Search Ads. You can include as many or as few pages as you wish. By choosing the second targeting option at the campaign level, Google will be able to use ONLY the pages included in these page feeds for DSA campaigns.

Setting up a Page Feed is fairly straightforward. I usually begin by acquiring a sitemap of my website, then excluding all the URLs I don't want to be part of it. (Depending on the size of your website, this task could be quite overwhelming, in which case it might be more effective to use all URLs as a target and establish extensive but powerful exclusion filters using the process mentioned earlier.)

Here is how to upload your list, navigate to the top menu, choose Business Data under the Setup option, and ensure you're on the Data Feeds page, accessible via the left-side navigation panel.

Next, simply click the blue "+" button, choose Page Feed, and adhere to the upload instructions provided.

The key point to remember regarding your URL source is that Google can display whatever it pleases from any list of URLs that you've granted permission for.

If there are pages on your site that should NOT be used for DSA, ensure that they are either excluded through Negative Dynamic Ad Targets or modify your permission list to solely Page Feeds, omitting those specific URLs from the lists

Step 3: Understand how the ad copy is produced for DSA campaigns.

Contrary to conventional search ads, Dynamic Search Ads only permit advertisers to provide a part of the ad copy: the two description lines.

In this context, it's vital to ensure the information you provide for your potential customers is pertinent, influential, and engaging, similar to any other ad.

However, this also implies that Google is partially crafting the ad copy on your behalf, specifically the headlines linked to your ads.

The encouraging part is that you have the ability to examine the headline copy Google is using for your ads. To do this, you need to access the Search Terms report under Dynamic Ad Targets. While you can't make any specific modifications, you can see the search terms and the headlines along with the landing pages Google used for your ads.

Step 4: Prevent cannibalization

One of the objectives of Dynamic Search Ads is to discover new queries that extend beyond your existing keywords. This aspect is actually highlighted in their Benefits section.

In most accounts I encounter that operate DSA and search campaigns simultaneously, DSA tends to target numerous search terms identical to those targeted by the other campaign's keywords. Despite Google's supposed prevention measures, this overlap continues to happen. And it happens quite often.

Fortunately, there's a straightforward solution to this issue.

Every time I initiate a DSA campaign, I gather all of the Exact match (and occasionally Phrase match) keywords from the existing search campaigns and incorporate them into a single Negative Keyword List. I then assign this list exclusively to the DSA campaign, ensuring that none of my existing keywords can be targeted in that specific campaign.

This method might sound a bit unusual, and some Google representatives may suggest it's unnecessary, but trust me, you'll appreciate the cleaner search terms reports you'll receive down the line.

Step5: Continuously apply negative keywords

This may not be a revolutionary concept for many, but for some, this might be news.

Even if you're not using keywords as your targeting method, this does NOT mean you cannot use negative keywords in your DSA campaigns.

Similar to a standard search ads campaign, you can access your Search Terms report, located under Keywords, and add negative keywords following a weekly routine.

Google DSA is a great tool to drive business performance

being an efficient and effective a good planned and executed structure that utilizes DSA campaigns will help us improve the performance without the need to create hundreds of ads

Here are those five steps to make the most out of Dynamic Search Ads in 2023:

1. Determine the suitability of your website for DSA campaigns
2. Grasp how Google Captures your URLs
3. Understand how the ad copy is produced for DSA campaigns.
4. Prevent cannibalization
5. Continuously apply negative keywords

If you enjoy posts like this, you might also enjoy my weekly newsletter: Reach4Growth. Join hundreds of subscribers and subscribe?here

Sharing actionable tips for impactful performance marketing.

Always 5 minutes or less.

www.reach4growth.com