5 Dynamic Search Ad Management Tips

Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) is a valuable product to help advertisers keep their AdWords campaigns effective and relevant. it maintains a fresh index of your inventory using Google’s organic web crawling technology to help ensure ads are generated based on the most recent content on your website.

Some tips and best practices for optimizing Dynamic Search Ads.

1. Add Negatives At Least Once per Week

Especially in the early stages of your DSA campaign, you should use the search terms and categories report to exclude searches and parts of your web site that you don’t want to advertise or that underperform. A good starting set of negative targets are any keywords you have paused or deleted in the recent past as well as any pages unrelated to selling products such as customer help pages and general FAQ’s.

I recommend starting with reviewing the search term report 2 times a week for new DSA campaigns and then reducing to once per week. Also, you likely already have negative keywords in your search campaigns so you should add those to your DSA campaigns before launching them.

2. Use the DSA Search Term Report to Build Out Additional Search Ad Group.

The advantage of dynamic search ads showing up for a wider range of terms is that you can use the search term report for keyword research. I’ll typically set a minimum number of impressions a search term must have to make it worth adding in as a keyword, for example, 20 impressions over 30 days. You can set a filter directly in the search term report for this requirement.

Then, use these keywords to build out your search campaigns. This way you can write more specific ads and set bids for these keywords.

3. Look for Opportunities to Segment Targets

The more segmentation you implement into your DSA campaign, the more control you’ll have over both query mapping and ad copy. Although you may initially launch campaigns with broader targets, you should always be looking at the performance to find ways to further segment your targets.

4. Set Bids Based on the Specificity of the Target

For your search keywords, you typically bid higher on the exact match terms compared to broad match. You want to follow this same strategy for Dynamic Search Ads. For example, if you have an ad group that is set to target just one product page on your website you’ll want to bid higher on that category compared to an ad group targeting a whole product category.

The more specific the targets you are working with, the higher your bids

5. Test Ad Copy

Just because the headlines of DSAs are generated dynamically doesn’t mean you don’t need to create ad tests for these campaigns. Each ad group should have at least two ads running with different descriptions. Like regular search ads, review performance on a regular basis, pause the underperforming ad and write a new description for testing.