How Should B2B Advertisers Use Dynamic Search Ads?

Is your company in a niche or expanding to a new market? Does your website have a large inventory? If the answer is yes to either of these questions, then you have probably encountered the following:

• Low search volume
• Difficulty identifying your best keywords
• Challenges in keeping up with new product launches and keyword expansion

Fortunately, there is a tool that can help you stay on top of these issues – and in front of your buyers: Dynamic Search Ads (DSA). While DSA campaigns shouldn’t be used without traditional ad campaigns, they can be an excellent way to augment your strategy and capture additional leads that otherwise would have been difficult to come by.

What are Dynamic Search Ads?

DSA campaigns are the easiest and quickest way to reach relevant search queries based on the content of your website. It is available on both Google and Bing.

Essentially, DSA campaigns allow the search engine to crawl the indexed pages on your website or your predefined page feed. The search engine then matches users’ search queries to the most relevant landing page on your website and dynamically delivers a tailored ad.

How are DSA campaigns different than traditional search campaigns?

DSAs have numerous time-saving applications that make them quick to implement effectively. Both Google AdWords and Bing Ads do the following:

• Match the content on your landing page to relevant search queries.
• Assist with ad copy creation by dynamically generating and delivering a tailored ad.
• Automatically crawl pages when you make changes or update your products.
• Pull the relevant URL from your website without you needing to enter it as a Display URL.

How can DSAs help B2B advertisers?

In our experience, there are three distinct advantages to implementing DSA campaigns for B2B brands:

1. Identify the Best Keywords for Niche Markets

If you’re having difficulties identifying keyword targets in a niche market, you could let the search engine do the work for you, instead of conducting time-intensive keyword research. DSA is a great type of campaign to conduct market research during the discovery phase, which helps accelerate the process of campaign implementation.

2. Uncover Missed Keyword Opportunities

One of the advantages of using DSA is to capture relevant traffic that you don’t have keyword coverage for in a traditional search campaign. Running DSA campaigns along with traditional search campaigns can help you capture queries that aren’t necessarily on your radar.

3. Target Long Tail and Specific Keywords

In most cases, if you target long tail keywords in traditional search campaigns, you’ll find low search volume and little traction. DSA, on the other hand, is a great way to capture long tail and specific queries, especially for large inventory ecommerce sites with hundreds (or thousands) of product SKUs.

When running ad campaigns for large B2B ecommerce sites, we use both traditional and DSA campaigns to ensure our keyword coverage is as wide as possible.  In many instances, the ROI of the DSA campaigns is much higher than the search campaigns.

We also notice that search terms that come from DSA include very specific names of product types, models, even SKUs.  These extremely specific types of searches carry a high intent to purchase and great conversion rates.

What types of targeting are available?

There are several targeting types available for both Google and Bing DSA:

All webpages: Target all the pages on your website. The search engine automatically discovers them.

Categories: The search engine automatically categorizes content on your website by theme. You have the option to decide the level of granularity by choosing which sets of pages to target.

Specific webpages:

• URLs: You could target URLs that share similar strings. This is a good option if your site has well-structured URLs.
• Page Title and Page Content: You can target certain webpages by keywords in page titles and content.

Page Feed (specific to Google)

• In addition to the above targeting options, Google AdWords allows advertisers to upload a page feed of what you want to promote and select the landing pages you want to include in your DSA campaigns. Essentially, advertisers can include a list of URLs with custom labels in a spreadsheet. Once the list is uploaded and approved, you can target by custom labels in ad groups. This feature gives more control over the specific pages that they want Google to crawl and show in the ads and B2B advertisers don’t have to worry that irrelevant pages may be triggered, for example, About Us and Career pages.

Does it sound too good to be true?

You may be thinking at this point, “This sounds great. Can I set it up and just let it do its magic?” And the answer is…absolutely not!

Like other types of campaigns, DSA has limitations and there are a few things to be cautious about:

• Before creating a DSA campaign, make sure that your website contains rich and high-quality content for the search engine to understand as it directly impacts your ads. Here are tips from Google to help your website get results.
• As you let search engine decide what the most relevant content on your site is, you should be prepared that there may be some mismatches. Routine auditing of the Search Query Report for a DSA campaign is an important step to confirm that you are driving relevant traffic and excluding any low performing queries.
• Take advantage of the legwork the search engine did for you by developing traditional search campaigns for high-performing queries that came in via DSA.
• Dynamically generated ads can sometimes not match user intent or fit properly with description text. To avoid confusion, make sure that your site is well structured and categorize the ad groups in a logical way. I highly recommend grouping targeted landing pages by themes or categories with a tailored and specific ad description. This simple step will prevent most “mismatches” from happening and deliver customized and relevant ad copy to the user.
• DSA and traditional campaigns should complement one another – don’t let DSA campaigns take away traffic from the high-performing keywords of your traditional campaigns. Make sure to put the targeted keywords of your traditional search campaigns are negative keywords in your DSA campaigns.

Final Thoughts

With the trend of automation in the paid search world, Dynamic Search Ads are one of the many tools that help marketers work smarter and more efficiently during initial keyword research and throughout campaign implementation.

How are you using DSA? Are you considering giving it a try for your account? We’d love to hear your thoughts.