After launching a Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) campaign, it is essential to monitor and adjust based on performance. Especially during the first initial week of launch, it can be crucial to eliminate waste from irrelevant searches.

 

Negatives, negatives, and more negatives: Since this is essentially a broad match campaign, adding in negatives keywords after launch is critical. For the first week, check the search query report on a near daily basis to mine for irrelevant negatives. Because Google is matching based on the context of your site, ads can trigger off of general exact match keywords that don’t make sense for your goals.. For example, a company that sells dog food would not want to match to just the term, [dog] or [food], but sometimes Google will feel these terms are relevant.

 

Bidding: Bid adjustments for DSA campaigns are done on the ad group or auto target level. Be more cautious with bid increases than you typically would be for keyword campaigns. Since you are increasing bids by entire groups of products, a 20% increase in bids can result in a drastic increase in cost. Start with 10% and check in and see if you need to be more aggressive. Also, unlike regular search campaigns, I would take the average position with a grain of salt. By increasing bids on a group of products and searches, it might not increase the average position but rather the breadth of searches we are eligible to show for.

 

Targeting & ad group creation: Allow data accumulate for 1-2 weeks to analyze what categories deserve their own ad groups. Once you have clicks and conversions for different categories, create new ad groups for each high-volume category or auto target. This will allow you to review data and adjust bids based on different product offerings.

  • If no categories populate automatically, use URL-based targeted to segment your traffic. The landing page report in Google Analytics is a good resource for what URLs to start with.
  • If only general categories populate or the DSA campaign is triggering a high volume of searches, you can use both category and URL-based targeting to create more granular ad groups. For example, if you are a reseller of swimsuits and the only categories that populate are the different brands that you sell, then you might want to increase segmentation based on women’s or men’s swimsuits.
  • In the screenshot below, Speedo was the prepopulated category, and I further segmented by adding in URL-based targeting for men’s swimsuits. Google then should only match search queries that fall under the category of Speedo and have a URL that contains mens.
dsa_category_setup

 

Reviewing headlines: Google does allow you to actually view the headline and the landing page for specific queries. This can be found under Auto Targets – See Search Terms. This is where you should review how your ads are actually displaying. Look through the search query report for high-impression, low-CTR search queries where the headline might not be relevant. Then you can add negative keywords and improve your Dynamic Search Ads’ CTR. It’s also useful to review high-converting searches and what landing page those matched to.

 

Category exclusions: If you have a section of your website that you do not want to actively show ads for, you can add certain categories or URLs as exclusions. This can be beneficial for skipping a clearance or sale page. Also, as you create ad groups based on website categories, these can be useful for filtering search queries to the appropriate ad group. These are added under Auto Targets – Category Exclusions.

 

Further category granularity: Over time, Google will collect more data for your categories.  It might eventually make sense to break out your categories into more targeted sub-categories.  You can view more granular categories with the See Categories button in the Auto Targets tab.  Once there, you can look at Top Level Categories, First Level Sub-Categories, or Second Level Sub-Categories:

category_granularity

 

Remarketing lists for search ads: Adding RLSAs to your DSA campaign can increase performance by enabling you to increase bids for a prequalified audience. Alternatively, if your DSA campaign is underperforming, it might make sense to limit the campaign to only people who have visited your site before.

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