No longer are we pushing out ads into the world with our fingers crossed it will reach the right person and promote some sort of engagement. Instead, in 2021, B2B advertisers need to use precision and personalization to captivate their intended audience.
Suppose you want to show up in a search query using traditional keyword targeting. In that case, you must not only have existing keywords within your account that match the ways users search for your product or service, but also you must have customized ad copy and well-designed landing pages that are relevant to the user. At a certain point, it is impossible to anticipate every query a consumer will use to find your business; this is where Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) come in. They allow you to optimize your targeting better and guarantee you are showing your ad to relevant customers.
WHAT ARE DYNAMIC SEARCH ADS?
DSAs are a search tool offered by Google (and Bing) that automatically targets audiences and provides them with relevant ads by matching search queries to your web content and the most relevant landing page on your website. DSAs are commonly used in SEM strategies to fill coverage gaps for businesses with more niche offerings, broad inventories, or location-based services.
HOW ARE THEY DIFFERENT FROM TRADITIONAL CAMPAIGNS?
DSA campaigns differ from text ad campaigns for two main reasons.
1. DSA Copy Headlines
With DSAs, the ad headline is dynamically created by Google, not you. The search engine will pull information directly from your website or page feeds to populate the DSA headline and then choose the most relevant landing page. All you have to do is write the description lines for the ad, and as you can imagine, having a tailored ad about the product searched for is a search advertising best practice that DSAs can help you achieve.
2. Bidding
DSA campaigns use a cost-per-click (CPC) budget, which means what you pay is determined by how many times your ad is clicked on, multiplied by the maximum CPC.
Text campaigns also use a CPC budget, but with DSA, you don’t apply these bids to individual keywords. Why? Because DSA doesn’t use keywords.
With DSA, you bid at the auto-target level, which is the list of different pages on your website that you can target. As soon as you set bids for each auto-target, you will show in the search results based on your ad rank.
HOW CAN DSAS HELP B2B ADVERTISERS?
Implementing a DSA campaign for your B2B brand could be beneficial for various reasons—let’s check them out.
1. Identify Best Keywords for Niche Markets
If your B2B brand is in a niche market, you probably find it challenging to identify keyword targets. If this is one of your problems, you should take a step back and let the search engine do the work for you rather than perform time-intensive keyword research. DSA is a great way to facilitate some market research in the discovery phase, which ultimately accelerates the campaign implementation process.
2. Reveal Missed Keyword Opportunities
Using DSA to capture relevant traffic you don’t have keyword coverage for in a traditional search campaign is one of DSAs most significant advantages. If you decide to run DSA campaigns with traditional search campaigns (which you should), you will be able to capture queries that weren’t necessarily on your radar.
3. Target Long-Tail and Specific Keywords
Usually, if you target long-tail keywords in traditional search campaigns, you will find yourself with low search volume and minimal traffic. On the other hand, DSA is excellent for capturing long-tail and specific queries. This is especially useful for high inventory B2B ecommerce websites with hundreds or thousands of product stock keeping units (SKUs). There are many instances where the ROI of DSA campaigns is much larger than traditional search campaigns for large B2B sites.
Search terms from DSA also include specific names of product types, models, and even SKUs. Since the searches are particular, they carry a high intent to purchase and significant conversion rates.
WHEN SHOULD YOU TRY DSAS FOR B2B?
The key value of DSAs is that they have the ability to fill in keyword coverage gaps to increase the number of ads for searches that are relevant to what your business is offering. To grow SEM performance for your B2B business, you have to consider the natural blind spots that exist in your current keyword strategy. Here are some of the most common reasons B2B businesses lack keyword coverage that provides for great opportunities to try out DSAs:
1. You Sell Highly Technical or Specific Products
If customers search for your product in super specific ways, it can be challenging to have complete keyword coverage. For example, if your industry uses a lot of jargon or developer language, using DSAs makes sense to help you capture relevant searches.
2. Your Products/Services Require Solution-based Queries
Let’s say your product is a new idea that people are searching for indirectly, or maybe your product applies to many different industries in various ways. In these cases, users are probably searching for it based on the need for their specific company.
For example, say you are a software development company that builds apps for other businesses. A prospective customer looking to build a food delivery app will probably search differently from a potential customer looking to design a fitness app. Your business can create both types of apps, so you want to show up in both of their searches and provide them with unique ads that take them to different landing pages based on their specific queries. If you don’t have the capacity or keyword insights to build coverage, DSAs are your best option.
3. You Offer Customized Packages
If your business offers a variety of services that customers search for in many combinations, it makes no sense to launch keywords for every single possibility. If you have keyword coverage for each service, use DSAs to cover any remaining combinations.
4. You Sell Products in Bulk
In the same way DSAs provide coverage for businesses with high product inventory, they can also be used when your company sells in bulk. Customers will more than likely be looking for your business differently depending on the bulk product they are looking for. If you have a page for each product you sell, then you have an excellent opportunity to roll out some DSAs.
TYPES OF TARGETING
Google and Bing DSA both offer several types of targeting. With both, you can target:
– All Webpages: You can target every page on your website, and the search engine will automatically discover them.
– Categories: The search engine will automatically categorize the content on your website by theme, and you have the option to determine the level of granularity by deciding which sets of pages to target.
– Specific Webpages:
URLs: You can target URLs that share similar strings; this can be a good option for your B2B website if you have well-structured URLs.
Page Title and Content: You can target specific web pages by keyword in your titles and content
– Page Feed (Google only): In addition to the targeting options above, Google AdWords allows you to upload a page feed of what you’re trying to promote and pick the landing pages you want to include in your DSA campaign. Basically, you are able to include a list of URLs that have custom labels in a spreadsheet. Then, after you upload the list and it is approved, you can target by custom labels in different ad groups. This feature allows for more control over specific pages you don’t want Google to crawl or show in ads. This way, you don’t have to worry about triggering irrelevant pages, like, a blog or about us page.
SOME THINGS TO CONSIDER
Now don’t get too excited; like any other type of advertising campaign, you can’t just set it up and let it go; DSA has some limitations and some things you should be a little wary of.
For starters, before you create a DSA campaign, you have to make sure your website already contains rich, high-quality content for the search engine to understand because this will directly impact your advertisements.
You also have to consider that when you are letting the search engine decide what the most relevant content is, you have to be prepared for some degree of mismatches. Therefore, continuous auditing of the Search Query Report for a DSA is crucial to ensure you drive relevant traffic and exclude low-performing queries.
When ads are generated dynamically, they sometimes might not match user intent or may not fit properly with description text. In order to avoid confusion, you should make sure your B2B website is well structured and that you logically categorized the ad groups. We recommend that you group targeted landing pages by the themes or categories with a specifically tailored ad description. This simple extra step will prevent most mismatches from happening so you can deliver customized and relevant ad copy to the user.
Stopping just at DSA campaigns can be a mistake. Use all the legwork the search engine did for you by creating traditional search campaigns for high-performing queries you found via DSA. In addition, both types of ads should complement each other. Ensure you aren’t letting the DSA campaign take away traffic from high-performing keywords of your traditional search campaigns. Do this by making sure to put the targeted keywords traditional search campaign as negative keywords in your DSA campaigns.
Automation in the paid search world is an ongoing trend. Dynamic Search Ads are a great tool for helping B2B business advertisers work not only smarter but also more efficiently during initial keyword discovery and throughout advertising campaign implementation. Our marketing experts at New Target can help you decide if DSAs are right for your B2B business and help you implement them into your digital advertising strategy.