Dynamic Search Ads For Google

Google Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) automatically show ads based on the content of your website. They are text-based ads with a dynamically generated Headline and Landing Page. Rather than using keywords, dynamic ads are triggered by a Dynamic Target, which consists of a website attribute or group of website attributes (e.g. URL, category, etc).

Note: Expanded DSAs (or eDSAs) are now the preferred DSA format within Google. To learn more about eDSAs, check out our eDSA article.

How Dynamic Search Ads Work 

The advertiser supplies Google with a website URL which Google then analyzes. It then displays the advertiser's creative for searches that relate to the website content – much like natural search does. The advertiser provides Desc 1 and Desc 2 elements of the creative, but the headline is auto-generated to match the user's search query. Bids for Dynamic Search Ads are set at the ad group level.

Support For Dynamic Search Ads 

The following table outlines current and upcoming platform support for DSAs:

Feature  MarinOne > Devices

Dynamic Search Creative Management

No

Dynamic Search Creative Level Reporting

Yes

Dynamic Target Management

No

Creation of Dynamic Search Campaigns

No

Dynamic Target Reporting (Cost & Revenue)

Yes

Dynamic Target Bidding

Yes

How To View Dynamic Target Level Reporting In Grid

This is a beta feature that's currently being tested. If you would like to test this beta in your MarinOne client account, please reach out to the Customer Support team.

Once you've been enabled for the beta feature, you can view Dynamic Target Level Reporting by hovering over the arrow next to the Keywords tab. From the drop-down, select Dynamic Targets

From here, you can see all Traffic Cost, Profit, Conversions, Revenue reporting, segmented by Device. This is powered by the MarinOne Analytics Engine, so you'll be able to receive Intraday Cost data for Google Dynamic Targets.

How To View Dynamic Search Ads In The Grid 

You can view your Dynamic Search Targets in the SmartGrid under the new Dynamic Targets sub-tab.

You can also view Dynamic Search Ads in either the main Creatives tab or on a per-group basis in the Creatives sub tab within a group. DSA’s have the Creative Type column header value of: Dynamic. From both of these views, you can create, edit, and delete a Dynamic Search Ad in the same manner as any other ad type.

How To Manage Dynamic Search Campaign Settings 

You can manage your Dynamic Search campaign settings in the platform. These settings can be managed in the Advanced Settings section of the campaign settings. From here, you can set a campaign as a Dynamic Campaign as well as specify the domain for dynamic targeting and language preference.

To create a dynamic campaign from scratch, you'll first need to create a regular search campaign in the platform, then enable the Dynamic Search Ads setting in the campaign’s Advanced Settings section.

Tracking Dynamic Search Ads 

Note: for Dynamic Search Ads, we recommend setting your tracking template at the campaign level or any level of the account hierarchy lower than account level. Because DSAs use 'keywordless' ads, account-level tracking templates can lead to attribution issues with keyword and match type Valuetrack parameters.

Dynamic Search Ads are supported by the platform's er and will inherit tracking template settings. However, because we recommend using the campaign-level tracking template, you will need to manually create a campaign-level template, otherwise, this template would be applied to all campaigns. 

We recommend manually creating a campaign-level template with just the creative parameter. To do this, you can use your account-level template as a starting, remove your other parameters (all except {creative}), and manually apply this at the campaign level. 

Note: While we recommend campaign-level templates created in this way, other parameters can be included in your template as long as the campaign-level tracking template has the keyword and match type removed (if just using Marin Tracker) or hard-coded if there's any connect mapping.

Note: If you're using autotagging to track your Dynamic Search Ads for Google, there is no additional tracking setup needed. 

Managing Dynamic Search Ads In Bulk 

To bulk add or bulk edit Dynamic Search Ads:

  1. Click the Ads tab, then go to Upload in the top-right, above the grid.
  2. Bulk upload the Dynamic Search Ads using the following headers:
    Account Campaign Group [Headline] [Description Line 1] [Description Line 2] [Creative Type] [Status] [Display URL] [Creative ID] [Custom Parameters] [Tracking Template] 
    Columns in square brackets are optional while columns without brackets are required. For the Creative Type column, upload the value as 'Dynamic.' The Creative ID column is used for edits only. 
  3. You can upload either as a bulk file or directly in the bulk window.

Managing Dynamic Search Targets In Bulk 

To bulk add/edit Dynamic Targets, follow these steps:

  1. Select  Upload in the top-right, above the grid, then choose Dynamic Targets from the top drop-down.  
  2. From the upload pane, add your upload to the text box or upload your file. You can follow the instructions listed in our bulk uploads article here.
  3. Bulk upload Dynamic Target using the following headers:
    1. Account 
    2. Campaign
    3. Group
    4. Dynamic Target ID: Required for edits
    5. [Condition1]: The available options are: CATEGORY, URL, PAGE_TITLE, PAGE_CONTENT
    6. [Value1]
    7. [Condition2]
    8. [Value2]
    9. [Condition3]
    10. [Value3]
    11. [Status]
    12. [Search Bid]
    13. [Unique ID]

Multi-Edit Support 

In addition to single and bulk edit support, the platform supports multi-edit of DSAs.

Written by Marketing @ Marin Software

Last published at: June 27th, 2023