Master DSA campaigns with PPC Bee

The differences between traditional search campaigns and DSA's (Dynamic Search Ads) are well known to any experienced PPC specialist, but a little tweak never hurts. The main difference is that while with a traditional search campaign you are in control of the entire ad content creation process, with DSA campaigns Google "extracts" a lot of the information from your website itself. 

The advantages of DSA campaigns include that they are more broadly targeted, as they don't target based on specific keywords that you specify, but target based on the content of the pages on your site. This means they can reach users that you might not reach on your own when manually entering keywords. But this generality also applies to headlines. In addition to targeting, DSA campaigns also automatically generate ad headlines, so you can only modify them by changing the web page itself.

Recently, Google has started recommending that you create traditional search and DSA campaigns at the same time because they are ideally complementary. To use military terminology, a DSA will arrange a "carpet raid" while a classic search campaign is more precisely targeted. The result is clear - more paying customers.

So now you know why you should use DSA campaigns. How can PPC Bee help you do that?

PPC Bee now offers the option to select "Search Campaign with DSA" in campaign creation, which allows you to simultaneously create a search campaign, a standalone DSA campaign or different DSA ad groups within a search campaign.

The last option on the right, creating two separate campaigns where one is a classic search and the other is a DSA, is something PPC Bee has been able to do for a long time. This option is best if you want to set a separate budget or bidding for each campaign. 

However, we'll focus on two new options we've recently added to the app, which are creating a dynamic ad group for each item and creating one generic DSA group for all products within a search campaign. 

When you use this option, you will automatically duplicate a DSA ad group for each ad in a classic search. This allows you to customize the description for each individual product in the DSA reports, using variables - typically product name, brand, etc. So you have both classic and DSA ad groups within the same campaign 1:1, which you can test and evaluate against each other.

As you can see right in the app preview, each ad group has its own copy with a "DSA" suffix (you can choose whichever one you want). 
If you then create the keywords for the search ad groups and move directly into ad creation, you can, as mentioned, edit the description for each DSA ad group separately and also using variables.

This option is more akin to the "carpet raid" we talked about at the beginning of the article. This way, you can add one generic DSA ad group for the whole campaign. The DSA ad group thus acts as a supplement to the search ad groups for each item.

In the next example, we'll show how to create a DSA ad group for each brand. But you can also break down campaigns by, for example, Google categories,  sales data from Google Analytics delivered via data enrichment, etc. It's up to you.

Here we see that we create a DSA ad group for each brand if we put the variable _brand_ after the campaign name. In our case, the DSA ad group is called "DSA Ad Group" in the system, but you can name it whatever you want.

In this case, when we create one generic DSA ad group for the entire campaign, we are limited  when creating the description. Descriptions are not generated for each product, but for the entire campaign, so they have to be much more generic and without the use of variables. This doesn't matter though, because the dynamic headline remains of course, so the DSA ad is sufficiently tailored to the impact page.

The most important thing is that if you're not already working with DSA campaigns, get started. You can reach different customers with your advertising than through traditional search, and if you have quality and unique text on your site, Google's algorithms can work wonders using data from your site.  We've covered the basic ways to set up DSA campaigns in PPC Bee above, but for a much more detailed and technical guide, check out our learn database, which will walk you through the whole process step-by-step. You don't have to worry about not getting it right.

If you have any questions, whether about the new DSA campaigns or anything else, be sure to contact us at info@ppcbee.com and we'll be happy to help.