Google Dynamic Search Ads: Everything You Need to Know

Hey, this is Austin from Grow My Ads. And in today's video, I'm going to give you everything you need to know about dynamic search ads. What they are, how to set them up. My favorite way of setting them up, how to make sure you're not showing any dynamic search ads on pages that you wouldn't want Google to be crawling on your website, as well as a secret campaign type that I love which uses dynamic search ads as well as remarketing. So let's go ahead and dive in. Okay, so first, what the heck? Our dynamic search ads. Here's a full support page on Google on dynamic search ads, basically, and I'll have this in the description. Basically what it is is you're allowing Google to crawl your website. And I will show you how to do that correctly when you set this up. And it's going to fire ads for the contextual data that is on your pages. So let's say you have a page about golf clubs and you want to have coverage of keywords that maybe you're not already targeting in your regular search campaigns. What a dynamic search ad would do would crawl the contextual information on your golf club pages. And it's going to fire ads for people who are searching for things that you actually have on your website that you might not have in your standard search ads. So why would you want to use dynamic search ads if you can just create regular search ad campaigns? Well, several reasons. Google has their own benefits here. My favorite reasons are, number one, it saves time. So instead of needing to manually create a bunch of different keywords and ad groups within campaign, dynamic search ads are a great way to get like large coverage. To me, it's like casting a wide net and be able to hit a bunch of search terms quickly using the technology that you get within dynamic search ads. It's a great keyword harvesting tool. As I mentioned, casting a wide net, it does keyword research for you to an extent. Now that doesn't mean you should not be doing keyword research before setting it up. I believe you should have very sound built standard search ad campaigns. Dynamic search ads live within them as a harvesting tool. That's how I use it. And I'll share an example of that in an account here in a minute. But what it does is it helps fill the gap of any keywords that you might not already have inside of your account. So going back to the golf club example, maybe you're already targeting a bunch of different golf club keywords, but dynamic search ads would be there to actually pick up even further search terms that people are searching that you now would have data on and potentially be able to add those back in as keywords. So that's what I mean, as it fills the gaps of the keyword selection you might be missing in your standards search ads already. And it's doing that by harvesting, by casting this wide net and you're getting a lot of different coverage from there. So it does not replace standard search ads. It is a tool that lives alongside standard search ads that helps you get wider coverage quicker and easier. So let's dive in. I'm gonna show you how to actually build one. Okay, so I'm in an actual account. One thing, you can build a dynamic search ad campaign. Only I see that strategy deployed a lot of times. Or you can add a dynamic search ad ad group within a standard search ad campaign. So what do I prefer doing? I prefer consolidation. So I like running dynamic search ads as an ad group that fits the theme of the current campaign that I have. So in this account example, I have a sectional sofa campaign that I'm going to be building a dynamic search ad group inside. I am doing that inside of that currently built standard search campaign. So I've got ad groups in there with keywords, and it's built like a standard search campaign. The dynamic search ad is just going to be an ad group that lives alongside all of that. Now, I could build that separately in a campaign if I wanted to. To me, you don't. It's unnecessary. Now I am going to show you later in this video one of my favorite little hacks. That is a separate dynamic search ad campaign. But for now I prefer consolidation. So if you're going to do dynamic search ads and you're going to build them in the way I'm going to show you, you just usually are going to build them alongside or inside of your current search campaign. So let's go ahead and do that now. So I'm inside of this sectionals campaign and I have regular bill ad groups. Now I'm going to be building a dynamic search ad group. So I'm going to go to this ad group, the blue little icon, to create a new ad group. So first it's going to say ad group type and you have standard. And what I'm going to do is now switch this over to Dynamics. So I'm changing the ad group type. That changes. Then all of the settings that you get through the build out. Okay, so you've got a lot of different targeting options. Now which ones do you use? So I'm going to share my favorites. You can use all of them if you want, but I'm just going to give you what I prefer doing. So you, you have this categories recommended from your website. So these are dynamic target categories that Google has already sort of lumped together based off of their crawl of your website and the data that they have. This is pretty wide coverage and can be useful. I don't like using it. So I could. Do you see this sectional. They have like a sectional category. I could just use target this sectional category and just rely on pretty much all the dynamic page information Google has and that they lumped into sectionals. However, I like using specific web pages. So here you can create a new rule to target specific web pages. So you can use exact URLs or you can actually create rules to target specific web pages. For example, let's say you're Best Buy and you sell TVs. Well, you sell a lot of different brands of TVs, right? You have Samsung, LG, Sony, Vizio, TCL, Roku, etc. Right? Well let's say you want to just target in your dynamic search ads. You don't want to show for all of the brands. You're just trying to target Samsung TVs. How would you do that? Well, you would create a URL contains and then you would have Samsung. Now this is if you're Best Buy or you know, you do this for LG or Sony. So let's say we put Sony in here. Same with any other one of their. So let's do like major appliances. Same with refrigerators. If you wanted to just go after. Well we'll do, we'll do laundry, we'll do washer and dryers. And here we've got the different brands that they have. So let's say it's just Maytag, right? Well every Maytag product page is going to have Maytag in the URL right there. So here I would just say URL contains make tag and this would now only be crawling the data contextual information here on my Maytag pages that then should only be showing search terms and ads, dynamic search ads for Maytag related keywords. So I like using the rule based URLs again you can do exact URLs too. So if you have like an exact URL you want to target, let's say you exactly want to target this product URL, you could go ahead and add the exact URL. I prefer using URL contains. You, you can also do page content contains. You could do Page title contains and then again the the URL, there's also the category. So you could select category. This is basically going back up to this though. So you don't really need to do that. When you do the specific web pages then you also have all web pages. So all web pages literally is targeting all web pages. Now this is as broad as dynamic search ad targeting gets. I there is a reason to use the all web pages. I will show you a little hack again at the end of this video on when to actually use this all all web page coverage. So for now I'm actually creating and this is what I'm doing sectionals and then I'm just doing, I'm tagging this dsa. So I know this is a dynamic search ad campaign and and then I'm actually going to do URL based and this is for a company called Home Reserve and it's this family friendly URL that I want to have covered John. So I am just going to do Boom. Contains, family friendly, you add and save and continue. Now ad creation is very limited with dynamic search ads. So you cannot create headlines that will be dynamically generated. You cannot create the display URL that gets dynamically generated and then the final URL is dynamically generated as well. So you're really leaning into Google and the information they have in order to create these ads. What you're able to do though is create descriptions. So these headlines, Google Ads will generate that from the content on your website and the search phrase that caused your ad to show. Same with the display URL and the final URL they will find the best landing page for your ad. In most cases when you're using URLs. So if you're using the exact URL or in my case I'm using family friendly URL here as a rule based targeting, it is going to send traffic here. However, if I were to use the category targeting so sectionals categories that it's going to basically send traffic to what it feels is the best landing page that it has lumped inside of the sectional categories, if that makes sense. But if you're using URL based rules for the targeting, which is what I prefer, you get better control of the landing pages. Most of the time it's actually sending it to the landing page that you're targeting. Exactly. Or using for your UR rule URL rule targeting like I am for family friendly in this example. Okay, so let me create this ad real quick and then I will show you kind of what that looks like. Okay, so I have created a quick ad. I'm not going to go too crazy with the ad creation process for this. What I really want to do is just show you what this is going to look like inside of here. So there are no keywords, right? This is a dynamic ad target. So there's no keywords. You have basically just your what what your dynamic ad target is. So again this is URL contains family friendly then ads you're going to have right here. And again you've got the description line one and description line two. So not much to the ad creation. Now what happens when you start running these dynamic search ads? How do you actually see what search terms they're showing for? Well, let me show you. Okay, so this is a old dynamic search ad group that was running and for the purpose here. So this campaign's paused. This was an actual full dynamic search ad campaign test a while ago. But you see your dynamic ad targets. So these were URL based targeting. However, how do you know like what the search terms were? Well, you go into your insights and reports tab and you just hit search terms. So it's very similar to like keywords where you, you see your keywords and then you're able to see what search terms actually fired for that. So here we can actually see what we were showing our ads for. Now you can take this even a step further with dynamic search ads. So if I go back to the dynamic ad target and I click on that, I can actually now hit search terms that fired for that exact dynamic ad target. What it's also going to do though is show me the headlines that Google created. So this is great because you're able to actually see then what kind of ad copy Google's creating. And in some cases you may have an issue with it. Now in this one wasn't too bad. It was just sectional shopping, home reserve, adaptable furniture, not what we ideally would want, but it's not terrible. Again, for the purpose of running dynamic search ads, which is for the most part the ease of it and then the keyword harvesting that you're able to do. So this was okay. Now how do you prevent Google showing ads for keywords you don't want to show for? I'm going to show you how to negate that. So you would go into your keywords and you would actually be able to add negative keywords. So I have a full video on negative keywords. I will have that on or in the description below. But for the purpose of dynamic search ads, a lot of times what you don't want to show for are going to be your brand terms that should be inside of a brand campaign. So in this example we have home reserve negated because we don't want home reserve ads showing in our dynamic search ad campaign. We want to control that traffic and we want to control the messaging 100%. So no brand traffic is running or did run inside of this dynamic search ad campaign. The other thing, a lot of times some competitor ads, I don't know if you, if you've ever done a search and you'll do a search for a company and you'll see a competitor user that company's name in the ad. A lot of times that is not a malicious on purpose act that that other company's doing. A lot of times it's actually a dynamic search ad that was pulling the competitor search term and Google is actually auto creating that as a dynamic headline and putting that competitor name in there. So if, if, if you ever typed in Nike and you see Adidas have Nike in the headline, a lot of times it wasn't then actually creating an ad for Nike on purpose because that's not allowed. It was actually the dynamic search ad piece doing it. So it does cause a lot of issues. So we have had clients where that was happening. They reach out to us because the competitor was upset and they saw the ad and they thought they were acting malicious and targeting them and putting their name in there and trying to click, you know, bait people wasn't the case. And it does cause confusion since a lot of people aren't going to understand what dynamic search ad targeting is and how it works. So to prevent that, a lot of times we'll also just add competitor names in our dynamic search ad campaign. So none of that potentially happens. Also what happens if you don't want certain pages being targeted? So if you're using like a category based targeting or even the all web pages, how do you prevent certain web pages from being targeted? And I'll show you what happened. So like in this campaign we were targeting landing pages from standard ad groups and all web pages. So this was a very, very broad target. However, if I went into the, the search terms. Well actually sorry, if I go into the landing pages, we were finding blogs and then also so it actually would contain landing page contains post. We were finding blog posts that Google was crawling and showing ads for. Now why is that an issue? Well, let me share with you why that's an issue. First, I don't really want to send traffic to this specific blog post. Let's See if this one still exists. So that page doesn't exist anymore. It used to, but let me show you why. So I'm going to go into. So hold on, let me go to search terms. And then I've got to go to. Okay, sometimes Google messes with this. But what I'm doing, I'm going to the campaign level here. I'm going to landing or dynamic ad targets. Okay? And then I'm going to this all web pages one. And I'm hitting search terms. So this is the search terms that fired for the all web pages. Now you'll notice this has given me not just the headline but the landing page. So why is that important? Well, because I just showed that we were showing ads on blog posts. We're a furniture company, okay. We had blog posts for whatever reason on gluten free party favorites and we were actually paying, you'll notice it wasn't a ton of traffic. We, we caught this very early. But I've done audits on accounts where they never caught it. And so they were just spending all this money inside of their dynamic search ad groups or campaigns, depending on how they had it structured. And they just were wasting all this money sending it to irrelevant blog traffic. I say irrelevant because someone who's googling gluten free dinner ideas or snacks or whatever, they have no intention of buying a sectional furniture from home reserve. So this was more of like an SEO play. And the content team was doing family friendly sort of posts that they could share with the email list, et cetera. So there was a reason behind having a gluten free party favorite blog post back in the day because again, this post has been removed since then. But it's not something I want to spend a single penny on on Google Ads. Uh, however, due to that, all web pages targeting it was hitting those posts. So how do I prevent certain pages that I wouldn't want Google crawling from actually crawling and showing ads for? Well, I'll show you. So you go to the dynamic ad targets. Then there's something called dynamic or sorry, negative dynamic ad targets. And then boom, here. Just like how you can create rules to target pages on your website like I did for the family friendly page or like I showed you for Best Buy for Samsung or Maytag. Now you can also tell Google it's like adding a negative keyword, but you're adding a negative page. You're saying, do not crawl this page. Do not show ads for any of the contextual information on those pages. So for us, we have added posts, anything with posts which would be blog posts do not crawl. So that instead of needing to go in and individually add every single blog post URL, I just made the rule, URL contains post, don't crawl it. So that got rid of every single blog post. Google nude. Do not crawl any URL that would have that. Then we didn't want to. It would do anything with our ottomans. We had customer comments, we wanted to get rid of that. We had a support page, we wanted to get rid of that. You normally don't need to worry about privacy policy pages or like shipping pages. Google's very good at like not targeting that. However, I have seen Google crawl gift card pages or gift certificate pages if people have that. I've seen Google accidentally crawl weird information on the about us page. I've seen them crawl weird information on clearance pages that certain websites might have some. They may have like a deep deals page. Now you're showing for all these like very broad deal terms. You don't want that. So make sure to go add all the negative pages or negate the pages that you would not want Google to crawl, just like we did here. And again, it's very simple. You're going to add it to the campaign or ad group level depending on your setup. And it's just going to be URL based page content based, page title based and content. The nice part there is, let's say on your page you would actually have out of stock. For a product that's out of stock, you can add that as well. Now stock is not an issue for us. So that's not something you would ever see on home reserves pages. But if I wanted to, if we did have out of stock ever page content that contains out of stock, it would know not to crawl and show ads for. So that's a very nice feature as well. Last, my favorite hack for dynamic search ads. So as you know, based off this video, I like using targeted URL based targeting for my dynamic search ad ad groups. I normally like to run dynamic search ad in ad groups, not campaigns. But there is a play for campaigns and that this is going back to the fact that you can do an all web pages targeting. So what you do is you create a campaign and you do an all web pages targeting. So this one's kind of already set up, right. However, instead of doing an all web pages targeting, just targeting everything, what you're going to do is target people who have been to your website but are now searching for things that you might not have keyword selection on. So you're you're kind of doing a broad strategy, but you're narrowing the audience to a remarketing audience. So how you would set that up is you would have your dynamic ad group for all web pages. Then you would negate the keywords that you don't want to show for your brand terms more than likely competitor terms potentially in this case, again, because you don't want the possibility of the brand name showing in the headlines and also dynamic negative ad targets that we just talked about in this video as well. Then you also want to go into audiences and that would be at your campaign level. And here you're only going to target. So we're going to set this to targeting, narrow the search of your campaign to select segments and we're going to do anyone who's visited the website in the last 30 days, I'm going to hit save. Okay, so now you would see I'm only targeting all visitors in the last 30 days and that is it. It's not going to. Or it shouldn't go to any other. Okay, so now I'm only targeting the all visitors 30 days audience inside of this campaign. At one point the there was an ad group bill. So it's showing all visitors seven days too. But we're redoing this. So again this is an old campaign. In a new campaign, none of this data would be showing. But what I'm doing is I'm only targeting remarketing visitors. Visitors within the last 30 days. Again, why? Well, I'm doing like this all web page broad targeting. And what it allows you to do is also keyword harvest. People who have been to your website, more than likely if they, if they didn't purchase, they're. They're interested in what you're selling. Right. So in this case, sectional sofas, what it gives us the ability to do is sort of laser target in on a remarketing group. It does normally work like in regards to generating revenue again and they're back searching for relevant traffic that you have content on your website and Google is only showing ads to them. So it's like a laser targeted remarketing approach for search. It's not using any display. So this is like a little hack that I like to use for dynamic search ads for certain accounts. And usually it does work pretty well. Again, you have to make sure you're adding negative keywords. You have to make sure you're adding negative dynamic ad targets when you're doing the all web page blast. But thankfully you're not blasting the world or whatever your geo targeting set to. You're just showing these ads or giving Google the ability to show dynamic search ads to a remarketing list. So it's fairly warm. There you go. There's everything you need to know about dynamic search ads. I hope you got great value from this video. If you have questions, put them in the comments below. I will do my best to answer as many of them as I can if I know the answer to it. We also have videos on standard search campaigns. How to set up a standard search campaign Step by step tutorial how to optimize a standard search campaign Step by step tutorial. Those videos will be in the description below. If you haven't seen those yet, make sure to check those videos out. Great, great content on standard search campaigns. There again, hope you got great value. I will see you in the next. It.