Try My Dynamic Search Ads Strategy & Build Long-Term Search Success

Here I’m going to suggest an approach to using Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) campaigns in mid-to-large ecommerce Google and Microsoft Ads accounts that is likely not what you’d hear from the typical account manager.

From what I’ve heard and read, most account managers use DSA campaigns to fill in the missing holes in their accounts by letting the search engine ad platforms find queries they’re not already targeting with their standard Search campaign, but they deem relevant to pages of their site.

They typically think about this campaign type after they’ve built out a lot of campaigns in their account to try and get as much site coverage as their budgets will allow.  What I’d like to propose is that you don’t wait, but use DSA campaigns as a foundation to build from.

Get immediate site coverage

One of the biggest challenges with building and managing mid-to-large ecommerce Google or Microsoft Ads accounts is the sure volume of product categories and products to work with.

If you’re going to follow best practices of making sure campaigns and ad groups are tightly matched between keywords, ads and landing pages, this can take a while to build out. Plus, even after you build out, you may be missing keywords in your targeting that would have made you eligible for all the queries you’d like to be eligible for.

In the meantime, you’re losing out on possible sales.

By starting with DSA campaigns and making them the foundation of your Search advertising, you immediately make all the pages of your site eligible to show ads quickly.  So as soon as you launch, you get full site coverage; whereas building out standard Search campaigns can take months depending on the time that’s allocated to do so.

In this post, I’m not going to get into the technical set up of these campaigns as there’s a gazillion posts about how to do that already. What I’m going to focus on is the latest strategy I’ve been using to launch, analyze and optimize these campaigns so that you can get the most bang for your buck out of your account.

Start with product URLs using a page feed

My first step of the process owes a big thank you to Purna Virji (Senior Manager, Global Engagement for Microsoft Advertising) for pointing this out.  One of the options for targeting a DSA campaign is to use page feeds instead of an engine’s index of your site; which is how these campaigns were traditionally targeted.  Back when the campaign type first started, you might have ad groups that would target all pages of your site and then specific ad groups that would target groups of pages of your site based on “URL contains xxxxxx.”  You would do this by using Google’s index of your website…

The problem with this approach is that advertisers would have all different types of pages (category, product, etc.) grouped together under one bidding strategy and budget.  As you can imagine, if you’re budget isn’t unlimited, most of the Clicks and Impressions would likely go to pages that the platform’s system matched to higher volume queries.  It was very difficult to impossible to easily single out groups of product pages to target together without getting overly granular and having way too many ad groups.

Purna points out in her article Page Feeds: A Smart Solution for Retailers to Level Up Their Dynamic Search Ads…

Page Feeds reduce the friction of managing DSA campaigns by enabling you to upload a spreadsheet of all the URLs you’d like to target, versus creating individual auto targets for each URL…they help maximize page coverage as well as enable the labeling and targeting of specific URLs via custom labels.

If you’ve already created a product feed to use for Shopping campaigns, then all you would have to do is pull the product page URLs from there for the page feed. If you haven’t created a product feed for Shopping campaigns yet, shame on you! 🙂 Go do that first and set up Shopping campaigns before you worry about DSA.

I simply copy/paste URLs from there into a new spreadsheet (here’s the template to use). Once I’ve done that, I place them into similar groups using custom labels. I then use those labels as my ad group names. Eventually, as data collects, I can change up custom labels and group my highest-performing products somehow to treat them differently. It’s up to me what I want to try out.

Move on to category pages

Now that I’ve got all of my product pages covered, I’ll want to cover the rest of the site as well.  So, I’ll create a separate page feed and campaign for category pages (including the homepage).  Most likely, how I label these will follow the site navigation/URL structure I’m working with.  While product pages should match to more specific queries that may be looking for products of a particular brand or particular specs, category pages should match to more general queries that likely won’t convert as well.

Buuuuttt, they can bring in a larger percentage of sales since the volume of use of those more general queries tends to be much larger.  It will really depend on the nature of the site and how people search for its products.

Like I said before, I don’t want these pages lumped in with product pages since they’re so much different. I want to be able to control budgets and bids on them separately. So, I’ll create a separate campaign to target these pages, with each ad group targeting a different category or sub-category of the site.

Analyze query to headline to landing page matching

Once I’m up and running and campaigns are collecting data, I may already be getting some pretty good performance. But of course, I want to keep optimizing to get the best performance possible.

Since the query matching and ads are dynamically generated by the engines, my main focus goes to analyzing how my landing pages are being matched to queries and the headlines the system is dynamically generating.

When I do this, I have 3 questions running around in my head as I look at each query my ads have been showing for…