Dynamic Search Ads for eCommerce – Why They Work

When you have an eCommerce store with many products, setting-up PPC ads for each product is daunting and nearly impossible to execute. There are so many variations of keywords and ad copy for each product and brand, which makes it unfeasible to capture all relevant searches.

Dynamic Search Ads for eCommerce will make your life easier and can make your campaigns more profitable. Remember, it’s easy to make Google Ads complex. We see the most success with simplified and easy to manage campaigns. Dynamic Search Ads for eCommerce will make your life easier.

Dynamic Search Ads are beneficial for eCommerce store owners for the following reasons: 

• Automatically scrapes content from landing pages on your website.
  • Rather than entering keywords, Google will do the work for you.
• Can help fill in the gaps of your keyword based campaigns.
  • It’s impossible to capture every search query typed into Google. The scraping of content and the dynamic creation of ads will help you.
• Headlines and landing pages get generated using website content , which keeps advertisements relevant while saving time.
  • You no longer have to worry about matching ad copy with keywords to improve quality score. Google will do this for you.
• You can still stand out with a unique description and sitelink extensions in your advertisement.
  • The entire advertisement isn’t auto generated, meaning you still have control and can create great messaging.
• You can target based on your entire site, specific pages on your site or categories.

Note: The bullets above were taken from this Google Resource. 

Real-Life Example Pertaining to Dynamic Search Ads

Throughout this article, I’m going to share dynamic search examples from our in-house eCommerce brand, DermWarehouse.

What makes our digital agency unique is in addition to working with many eCommerce companies, we started our own in-house eCommerce skincare company [learn more about our story].

We practice what we preach by investing our own money into our advertising campaigns. We love sharing our pain points throughout our entrepreneurial journey so you can learn from our mistakes to save money and increase profitability. There were pain points pertaining to PPC, which made the switch to dynamic search ads so important.

Past The Point of No Return

If your eCommerce store sells a dozen products, management of the campaign is feasible. You can bid on keywords pertaining to each products with proper oversight. When you scale beyond 20 products, management becomes difficult. For DermWarehouse, we started small but expanded quickly. We now sell thousands of skincare products from hundreds of brands. We needed a better alternative to PPC, which is where dynamic search ads came into play.

From Google Ads Help: Without Dynamic Search Ads, even well-managed Google Ads accounts with many keywords can miss relevant searches, experience delays getting ads written for new products, or get out of sync with what’s actually available on advertisers’ websites.

For DermWarehouse, we were having FOMO (fear of missing out). We’d view our search terms report from PPC and see amazing queries from prospective customers. With hundreds of PPC campaigns within our account, we realized it would be impossible to manage our account and there’d be missed opportunities.

Dynamic search ads can helped solve the following issues.

• Management of our account became manageable (which should always be the case)
• Segmented our dynamic search campaign in a strategic way that aligned with our business model
• Bid up and down on strong performers versus weak performers
• Leverage search terms and converting keywords to create additional PPC campaigns

Example Dynamic Search Advertising Copy

Before diving into the benefits of dynamic search ads for eCommerce, it’ll be good to visualize what a dynamic advertisement looks like. Below is a dynamic advertisement created for Revision Skincare, a brand carried by DermWarehouse.

You’ll see the landing page is dynamically generated as is the headline and the display URL. The advertiser has the capability to create description 1 and description 2 along with sitelink, call-out and other extensions.

Dynamic Ad Target 

Instead of bidding on keywords, you’ll choose dynamic ad targets. The dynamic ad target is what helps Google scrape the proper information from your site to showcase the most relevant advertisement.

For this specific ad group for the dynamic ad target, the URL contains “revisions-skincare.” This allows us to create dynamic advertisements towards people who visited the brand pages specific for Revisions Skincare.

You can run a dynamic ad campaign based on the following:

• Generate Dynamic Search Ads based on all webpages available in your website domain.
• Include specific pages from your website domain based on their category, page content, page title, or URL. You can select different bids for different sections of your website or exclude pages on your website that you don’t want to be used for generating your ads.
• Use dynamic target categories recommended for your website to select several pages that match a specific theme for your targeting goals.

Drill Into Landing Pages

It’s crucial to analyze your performance you drill into the “Landing Pages” tab within Google Ads. This will show you the top performing landing pages associated with your dynamic search ads. Remember, landing pages are dynamically generated.

If you were to run a dynamic search ad on your entire site, it could be a free-for-all so you’d want to see which landing pages drive the most clicks and conversions.

In the Revisions Skincare example, there are still a dozen product pages associated with this brand as they have an extensive line of products. The “Landing Pages” tab will showcase which product is performing the best and you can make adjustments accordingly. Below, you can see that the Bodifirm product is what converted.

Drill Into Search Terms

Similar to Google Shopping, you aren’t bidding on keywords with dynamic search ads. Google is scraping the data on specific pages on your site. Yet you still have insight into the search terms report, which provides invaluable information. Below is a small sample size but you can see that “Revision Bodifirm” was the converting search term.

Double Down on Converting Search Terms

When you see a converting search term, you can take this and add it into a PPC campaign specifically for “Converting Search Terms.” This campaign would have many ad groups, with one keyword per ad group for each converting keyword.

You’d then be able to match the ad copy to the keyword to receive a high quality score. The oversight would be fairly simple as you would have one account that you can filter based on key performance metrics such as conversion value, ROAS, etc.

Account Structure

Every eCommerce operation is different, which means your structure of dynamic search ads will be different. For DermWarehouse, we like to segment based on brands so we can see which brands are performing the best via dynamic. This means we create different ad groups for all of our brands based on the dynamic ad target. This provides us with the ability to increase bids on brands that are performing well and decrease bids on brands that are eating up clicks without many conversions and low ROAS.

If you are a retailer that doesn’t buy from brands/manufacturers, it could make sense to segment based on the type of product (T-Shirt, Shorts, Tank Tops, Polo’s).

There are many ways to go about structuring your dynamic search campaigns. If you need help with the structure, you can reach out to our experts.

Thank You For Saving Us Dynamic Search Ads!

Dynamic Search Ads are a great solution or eCommerce companies with a large inventory. If you leverage dynamic search ads properly, you can have a simplified solution with better results. We’ve seen this firsthand with DermWarehouse and many other eCommerce clients.