If you have full coverage on your brand and core non-brand keywords, then Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) are a fantastic resource for increasing non-brand paid search traffic. Unlike keyword targeting, Dynamic Search Ads campaigns use your website content for targeting. DSA campaigns automatically match your ads to searches that are relevant to your website content. Ad headlines and landing pages are dynamically inserted at the time that a search is made, ensuring a high level of ad and LP relevance.

Why use DSA?

DSA carries several benefits for both lead-gen and ecommerce accounts.

Keyword research

Even if you’ve done extensive keyword research, it’s likely that there are other terms consumers use to search for your products. Dynamic Search Ads will match you to these searches, and you can then add the relevant keywords to your standard Search campaigns.

Additionally, if you have niche products that generate low search traffic volume, you can target those product pages to see what queries are matching to those products. You can then use this information to build out new campaigns to target consumers interested in these products.

Long-tail keyword capture & headline matching

We wouldn’t normally break out extremely long-tail keywords that drive very low search volume. With DSA, we can match to those searches and show a headline that matches the search query. DSA allows us to show a hyper-relevant ad and take searchers to the most relevant landing page based on their search.

This feature is particularly useful for ecommerce retailers with hundreds of products. There’s no need to build out keywords for every single variant of every product in your inventory. A DSA campaign targeting the relevant pages will match a highly-relevant ad to any number of long-tail search queries.

A word of caution

While DSA does provide some great benefits, it also gives you less control over search query matching, headlines, and landing pages than traditional keyword campaigns do. You should check for negative keyword opportunities frequently, especially during the first few days and weeks after the campaign is launched. Additionally, if you’re highly sensitive to ad copy, or in an industry where advertising copy is highly regulated, then you should consider if the dynamically-generated headlines will meet your brand standards.

How can I set this up on Bing?

Dynamic Search is a newer campaign type for Bing, and a quick setup guide is below. Bing has not yet released this feature to all advertisers, but this should happen over the next few months. (You can find AdWords setup instructions and tips here.)

Create the campaign

In the campaign view in the UI, click “New Campaign,” and you’ll see “Dynamic search ads” as a campaign type option:

Bing DSA set up

Campaign settings:

  • After selecting Dynamic search ads, you will enter your campaign settings (name, budget, etc.)
  • Make sure you enter your website name correctly – you won’t be able to change it after you’ve created the campaign

Ad group setup

You have three options here:

1) Target recommended categories – If Bing has already categorized your site in a way that mirrors your DSA targeting strategy, then this option likely makes sense.

Bing DSA target recommended categories

2) Target all webpages – This can be a good starting point if Bing has not yet determined categories, or if you want to start with one ad group to begin gathering data. With DSA campaigns, as with regular Search campaigns, it’s generally best to implement a granular account structure, so you should only use all webpages targeting to gather data before implementing a more granular campaign strategy.

Bing DSA target all webpages

3) Target specific webpages – you can use this option if you only want to target certain areas of your site, or if you want to create separate ad groups to target unique elements of your site. For example, an online shoe retailer could leverage their URL structure to target by shoe type, such as /sandals for all sandals.

Bing DSA target specific webpages

Ad Creation

You will create a text ad that contains only the body text. Bing will dynamically generate an ad headline and landing page based on your website content and the search query for each individual auction.

Once you’ve launched your Bing DSA campaign, make sure to check in regularly for any negative keyword opportunities. Also, consider moving your top-performing DSA search queries into keyword Search campaigns to take advantage of the extra traffic you’re generating with DSA.

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