Still mourning Exact Match Keywords?

Maybe the changes to Dynamic Search Ads, announced earlier today, will lift your PPC spirits.

While fundamental best practices remain the same (leverage the hell out of negative keywords to avoid cannibalizing search campaigns; combine with RLSA to enrich your remarketing strategy; only bid manually), Google has made three significant alteration to DSA, all of which could have a profound impact on your account performance.

The central theme to Google’s update is specificity: all three changes will give advertisers a better handle on the quality of both targeting and ad creative.

Whether you use DSA to wrangle a gang of products or your sprawling site architecture into a coherent, profitable Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords) strategy, the addition of page feeds, ETA, and quality enhancements should have you laughing all the way to the bank.

Dynamic Search Ads Improvement #1: Page Feeds

According to Google, Page Feeds give you an added layer of control over your DSA campaigns.

Your customers are more likely to convert when the ads they’re served relate to products and services that fill a need or solve a problem. This is marketing 101. Unfortunately, previous iterations of DSA didn’t always make it easy for advertisers to display hyper-relevant creative to their prospects.

adwords dynamic search ad page feed template

Page Feeds allow you to create a feed (read: spreadsheet) of what you want to promote and add it to a new or existing dynamic search campaign. Google will incorporate this information when determining when your ads show, who they are shown to, and which landing page a prospect will land on.

You’ll also have the opportunity to apply custom labels to your newly created page feeds, affording better organization. As an example, Google suggests creating a label called “Holiday Promotion” and applying it to a group of products that will go on sale; you can also use labels to identify products that are out of stock (or sell out quickly), making it simple to cease paid traffic to those pages when active.

A time-saver like this will be a boon to eCommerce advertisers on Google Ads looking to simultaneously save time and deliver hyper-relevant content to prospects.

Dynamic Search Ads Improvement #2: Expanded Ads (FINALLY)

Expanded Text Ads are making headlines again.

While the transition to ETA on search occurred back in January, the new, larger ads were yet to make their way over to DSA.

The wait is almost over, people.

The new Expanded Dynamic Search Ads pair extremely pertinent copy and landing pages with a higher character count, giving you even more room to get specific with your ads.

Here’s what the current DSA creation interface looks like:

existing dynamic search ad creation ui adwords

Now, check out the screenshot below, which illustrates the ad creation screen for Expanded DSA.

expanded text ads dynamic text ads 2017

LOOK AT ALL THAT REAL ESTATE.

The new, expanded description section gives you additional space in which to woo your prospects, while the other features remain dynamic as ever.Google says ETA are coming to Dynamic Search Ads “over the next month.” We await with baited breath.

Dynamic Search Ads Improvement #3: Quality Enhancements

“Quality Enhancements” is admittedly murkier than the other two improvements to Dynamic Search Ads, but who can argue with better quality when every click is money from your pocket?

Per Google’s description of what “quality enhancements” entails, it would appear the focus here is on location-based targeting. “If you’re a baker in Palm Springs, your ads should only show to people who are looking for baked goods in Palm Springs.” While this is a no brainer, if Google’s latest round of DSA upgrades makes it easier for me to find a cronut in the Back Bay on a dreary Tuesday afternoon, I’m all for it.

Google says that, so far, with the updates to DSA, “advertisers are seeing on average an increase in conversion rate and a decrease in CPA.”

If that ain’t the dream, I don’t know what is.

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Meet The Author

Allen Finn

Allen Finn is the co-founder of Toasted Collective, a cannabis-focused digital agency. Many moons ago, he worked at WordStream, where he reigned as fantasy football champion for some time.

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