Dynamic search ads are being promoted heavily by Google. This is an ad format that could benefit many businesses that do not have a dedicated PPC specialist on their staff, or wish to avoid hiring a provider. However, dynamic search ads could end up costing you heavily if you’re not careful.
What are Google Dynamic Search Ads?
Google dynamic search ads have been making a lot of waves recently. Google has actually had this tool available for some time, but the promotion of them has been heavier in the past year or so. Dynamic search ads promise to be a revolution in the paid search ad game, giving you an automated way to harness the power of the Google search network.
Prior to the release of dynamic search ads, Google had unleashed dynamic display ads. Dynamic display ads take images from the website being promoted, and push them across the internet to various placements, using dynamic targeting to find the most valuable consumers for the business.
Google then expanded this to the traditional text-based search ad. Now, dynamically generated ad copy can display on the SERP just like other PPC ads. However, the text is automatically created and pulled from your website, so you don’t have to write your own ad copy.
What’s more, you can also use dynamic targeting to find the most likely consumers for your product or service. Rather than creating your ad group yourself, Google will use their powerful AI to create it for you.
This removes the need for a specialist, in theory. Most Google Ads professionals are hired because they are experts at using keywords and audience targeting to drive conversions and results for clients. So dynamic search ads could take the place of a dedicated specialist, right?
Maybe.
The Importance of Good SEO
How does Google get the text for dynamic search ads? Your site is crawled by the search bots, and uses your meta information to populate the text in the ads. This is helpful, unless your website has really bad metadata, which many do.
Page titles and meta descriptions might include phrasing that makes no sense in the context of an ad. Similarly, if you put something at the top of a page with an <h1> tag, Google assumes this is important and can use it to create the ad.
If your page titles and descriptions are not written to be user friendly, the search results will not appear as an attractive piece of text.
Also, do you know how organized and logical your sitemap is? Do you know what a sitemap is? Either way, if you do not have a logical sitemap, Google’s bots will index the pages in any order, and make a mess of your dynamic ads.
In short, you have turned your creative over to Google, with no real recourse to alter or change the ad copy. Even spelling and grammatical errors can be picked up and used by the bots.
No Control
You do not need to create headlines or descriptions when using dynamic search ads. In fact, you can’t. In addition, you will be unable to see the ads themselves by looking in the ads management platform.
All you will see is [dynamically generated headline]. This gives you no insight into what is being promoted to the consumer, and no idea how to follow up with a lead from these ads. Your copy could have lines that are out of order, and the context of your creative could be a complete mess. And you wouldn’t even know it.
Results Speak for Themselves
We have tested these ads time and time again. While they do not perform horribly, there is a significant drop-off with dynamic search ads that can be avoided when you manually create your ads.
Most dynamic ad campaigns start out well. They tend to gather a lot of activity, and even produce some conversions. This carries on for a month. Then suddenly, there is a drop-off. We saw decreased traffic and increased costs, with conversions being few and far between in the second month. By the third month, the cost increases were so astounding, the ads were shut off immediately.
Without any control over bids and copy, there was no way to alter the cost of these ads. Even adjusting the daily budget did nothing to slow the cost increases, however, when these budgets were lowered, the number of conversions decreased significantly.
In comparison to responsive search ads, overall performance of dynamic search ads was much less impressive. Responsive search ads allow for you to create the copy and target the ads yourself, but rotates the headlines and descriptions based on the searcher’s information.
Overall, the use of Google dynamic search ads should only be a last resort if you can’t find a qualified Google Ads expert to help you with your paid search campaigns. Luckily for you, Karasin PPC offers low-cost management of PPC ads. Contact us today for a no-obligation digital asset analysis.