Google’s Overhaul Of Dynamic Search Ads Now Live Globally With Category Targeting

An example of the updated DSA interface.

Google announced this spring during the livestreamed Inside AdWords event that Dynamic Search Ads was getting a reboot. Tuesday, the overhauled interface became available to all advertisers globally.

With Dynamic Search Ads (DSA), Google automatically generates text ads for inclusion in an auction based on your site content as opposed to the keywords you input into a campaign. Google creates the headline and ad copy and chooses the landing page based on a crawl of your site.

The idea is that DSA can be used to cover your bases for keywords that aren’t already in your campaigns. These may be unique or low-volume queries or location-oriented searches that use “near me” or “nearby,” which, according to Google Trends data, have doubled in the past year.

What’s New

DSA has always relied on crawling and indexing site content; what’s new is that it now also creates categories of your site content for ad targeting. When selecting the option to “Use categories recommended for your website” (see screenshot above), you’ll see the way Google categorized the products on your site. In the example above, there is a Furniture category which is then sub-categorized by “dining room furniture,” “bedroom furniture,” and so on.

While you do lose some control compared to selecting specific product pages, targeting by category can save setup time or expand on DSA targeting you’re already doing.

For each suggested category, Google provides samples of the types of search queries it will target, text ad examples and landing pages. Bid recommendations are based on the performance of keywords in your other campaigns that target similar queries.

Below is an overview video from Google explaining how it all works: