Expanded Dynamic Search Ads For Microsoft Advertising

Expanded text ads are designed to maximize your brand's presence whenever your ad is served to a user. Longer headlines and description lines allow you to show a user more information about your business before they even click your ad. 

Now, the Expanded Text Ad format has also rolled out to Microsoft Advertising's Expanded Dynamic Search Ads (eDSA) ad type so that when you create an ad, you'll be able to use the expanded Description field to provide deeper messaging that focuses on what you're customers really care about.

In this article, we'll explore eDSAs in more depth and explain how you can manage them in the Marin platform. Let's get started. 

What Are Expanded Dynamic Search Ads? 

In a nutshell, eDSAs give you more space to describe your product or service, so they're a very good thing for your business. So what's different about expanded DSAs? Below are the key differences you'll discover when you start to work with Expanded Dynamic Search Ads:

  • One longer description field (80 characters)
  • Display URL field becomes "dynamically generated" by Microsoft Advertising

You, as the advertiser, will supply Microsoft Advertising with a website URL, which Microsoft Advertising then analyzes for relevant information. Microsoft Advertising will then dynamically generate a relevant Display URL to match and display your ad for searches that relate to the website's content, similar to a normal search.

You are able to provide description elements of the creative like normal, but the headline will be auto-generated to match the user's search query. Bids for eDSAs are set at the group level.

Platform Support For EDSAs 

The Marin platform offers both ad-level reporting of eDSAs.

To view Expanded Dynamic Search Ads, click Accounts > Ads. eDSAs use the value 'Expanded Dynamic' within the Creative Type column header. 

For tracking eDSAs, please follow the same best practices as existing Dynamic Search Ads. 

Tracking EDSAs 

For tracking eDSAs, we recommend setting your tracking template at the campaign level or any level of the account hierarchy lower than account level. Because eDSAs are 'keywordless' ads, account-level tracking templates can lead to attribution issues with keyword and match type ValueTrack parameters. 

eDSAs are supported by the platform's URL Builder and will inherit tracking template settings, however, you will need to manually create a campaign-level template, otherwise, this template will be applied to all campaigns.

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

Note: While we recommend campaign-level templates be 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 your tracking uses a back-end connect mapping.

Written by Marketing @ Marin Software

Last published at: December 6th, 2023