As a PPC specialist agency, we were intrigued by the notion of keywordless ads but also somewhat unsettled by the potential lack of traffic control our PPC methodology is founded upon. Google finally launched their Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) in the summer of 2012 as a limited availability Beta product. It subsequently became a fully live, global product by the winter of 2012. Read more…

1. EARLY EXPERIMENTS
WITH GOOGLE ADWORDS
DYNAMIC SEARCH ADS
An eSearchVision Whitepaper
December 2012-12-10

2. EARLY EXPERIMENTS
WITH GOOGLE ADWORDS
DYNAMIC SEARCH ADS
An eSearchVision Whitepaper
December 2012-12-10
CONTENTS
Introduction · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 1
What are Dynamic Search Ads · · · · · · · · · 1
Project #1 Outline & Outcome · · · · · · · · · · 2
Project #2 Outline & Outcome · · · · · · · · · · 4
Conclusion · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 5

3. Introduction
As a PPC specialist agency, we were intrigued by the notion of keywordless ads but also
somewhat unsettled by the potential lack of traffic control our PPC methodology is founded
upon. Google finally launched their Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) in the summer of 2012 as
a limited availability Beta product. It subsequently became a fully live, global product by the
winter of 2012.
We saw that there could be value in this sort of campaign as long as we understood the
best way to manage it without cannibalising from our existing keyword set. We signed up
two accounts initially to test this feature out and, although more have followed, these early
two accounts are the ones with the most data at the time of publishing.
What we have found so far suggests there is real value in using DSAs as a cost-effective
way to achieving incremental revenue/conversions although much care is needed.
What are Dynamic Search Ads?
Dynamic Search Ads describes a
specific campaign type where:
WEBSITE
• An advertiser sets up all or sections of the
advertised website as target landing
pages within the campaign.
• Each target can have a specific bid.
• Different ad groups can be created for
each target (or URL).
Scans Website for LPs,
chooses user
searches to deliver ads
Populates Ad Title
& Chooses URL
• For ads, a fixed Description is written by
the advertiser but the title will always be
dynamic and is written by Google
algorithm.
Buy things
Buyourthings.com
Buy our items with
free shipping
• The other automated elements in a DSA
campaign are the searches against which
the ads are served (hence no keywords
are involved from the advertiser end) and
Wider AdWords
Account
the URL that is chosen as the landing
page (chosen from the potential pages in
the targets section you define).
Added as bidded KWs
1

4. Project #1
Outline
The first client with which we implemented a DSA campaign was a travel client and
focussed on promoting a specific destination and product type due to budgetary limitations
and to be conservative in the monetary risk of the trial.
The campaign was initially created without many negative keywords and it took some time
for the targeted areas of the site to be crawled (around 3 days). We then had to review the
URL ranges crawled and excluded any inappropriate URLs.
2 DSA ads were created so as to test Description text performance but only one ad group
was employed in this case.
Bids were set at roughly broad match levels for our generic keywords.
Outcome
Volumes were never high, partly due to budget and partly due to the need to reduce bids to
prevent cannibalisation of other parts of the account. The aim was to get relevant ads
serving against keywords we weren’t already delivering for.
The client had a preferred Cost of Sale (CoS) percentage which we aimed to stick to and it
started out high. We found that the range of searches against which the ads were serving
was extremely wide but using Search Query reports allowed us to identify and prevent the
irrelevant terms.
Eventually, the performance improved and up to the time of writing is sustainably profitable
although remains low volume.
There is now quality score but thanks to refining the sorts of searching showing the ads, we
saw CPCs remain effectively flat but average rank rise from 7 to 6 as CTR rose from 1.1%
at the start to over 1.7% last week.
Fig. 1 , Fig. 2 and Fig. 3 shows the evolution we saw.
2

5. Fig. 1
REVENUE
COST OF SALE
£12,000.00
10.00%
9.00%
£10,000.00
8.00%
7.00%
£8,000.00
6.00%
5.00%
£6,000.00
4.00%
£4,000.00
3.00%
2.00%
£2,000.00
1.00%
£-
0.00%
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
WEEK
Fig. 2
CLICKS
CONVERSIONS
350
6
300
5
250
4
200
3
150
2
100
1
50
0
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
WEEK
Fig. 3
AVERAGE RANK
CPC
8.00
£0.45
7.00
£0.40
£0.35
6.00
£0.30
5.00
£0.25
4.00
£0.20
3.00
£0.15
2.00
£0.10
1.00
£0.05
0.00
£1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
WEEK
3

6. Project #2
Outline
TThe second client we tested against was in retail and had very much tighter margin
requirements but we felt that the potential volume was significant and that the right set up
could be established to make DSAs sustainable.
The test was in 3 stages, we tried the small New Zealand market initially since we had no
ads serving there. Unfortunately, this stage did not yield an ROI that could be justified even
after several weeks but some lessons had been learned and we moved on to trying the
DSA in the Canadian market instead, where our client has a brand presence, as a
complement to our keyword campaigns.
A principle benefit we hoped for was to potentially serve against trademarked terms (or
variations) that we thus far could not directly bid on. The account was mainly built on
Product Feed (PF) campaigns (i.e. feeds containing product details, prices, features etc.
and the inventory status is sent to us by FTP and our systems automatically build ad
groups, ads and long-tail keyword lists).
We had three different target adgroups that had all previously performed well in normal
search campaigns:
• Computing
• Electronics
• Fashion
Outcome
In the first month, we saw significant incremental conversions via the DSAs with
comparable CPCs and CTRs but with lower-than-required conversion rate and ROI (Fig. 4).
Fig. 4 DSA ad groups compared to PF content (first month of DSA delivery)
Avg Pos
Clicks
CTR
CPC
DSA Computing
5.6
145
0.62%
€0.10
DSA Electronics
5.4
374
0.91%
0.10
DSA Fashion
5.8
148
0.87%
0.10
Full PF
3.3
1,386
0.67%
0.09
Conversions Conv. Rate
Cost
Revenue
ROI
CPA
258
38.68%
€61.07
€53.33
0.87
0.24
694
50.07%
€124
€145.16
1.16
0.18
In response to the KPIs, we lowered bids and added negative keywords so that by
midway through the second month we had the stats shown in Fig. 5.
4

7. Fig. 5 DSA Ad groups compared to PF content (first 2 weeks of 2nd month)
Avg Pos
Clicks
CTR
CPC
DSA Computing
6
84
0.63%
6
213
0.69%
0.08
DSA Fashion
5.8
5
0.26%
3.35
1,057
0.74%
0.09
Revenue
ROI
CPA
0.08
Full PF
Cost
0.08
DSA Electronics
Conversions Conv. Rate
155
51.32%
€24.74
€37.05
1.5
0.16
532
50.33%
€95.28
€122.74
1.29
0.18
As you can see, the conversion rate has significantly improved and is above the keyword
campaigns and all other KPIs compare favourably with the PF campaigns.
Now ROI was in a position we were comfortable with and average ranks/ CPCs
suggested that were not cannibalising clicks with PF we began to expand into more
categories, given their own campaigns so that we could monitor results more effectively
and optimise efficiently.
The picture with two and a half weeks gone since the latter improvements is a sustainable
ROI of 1.14 and volumes now beating keyword-bid campaigns (Fig. 6).
Fig. 6 DSA compared to PF content (first 2 weeks 3 days after optimisation)
Cost
Revenue
ROI
CPA
40.46%
€234.24
€255.58
1.14
0.2
41.19%
€203.61
€200.62
0.99
0.22
Conversions Conv. Rate
Avg Pos
Clicks
CTR
CPC
DSA
5.91
2889
0.65%
0.08
1169
PF
3.56
2224
0.8%
0.09
916
Since this data was collated, we have found it valuable to restructure so as to allocate
budget better to the product ranges with more potential to spend and this has kept
performance strong but with enhanced volumes.
Conclusion
Overall, the conversion rates on DSA that we see achieved are surprising and pleasing but
the general efficiency is also an excellent sign. It does take some weeks to properly hone
the traffic (this time is inversely proportional to the volumes of clicks and conversions) but
once this is done and the correct bids settled upon, DSAs are proven to provide
sustainable and significant levels of incremental conversion volume.
The volumes and the levels of incremental potential are greatly dependent on the vertical
and sometimes advertiser involved so we can’t yet recommend that we would see the
same performance everywhere. However, we can see that rolling DSA campaigns out in a
sensible way and responding to the observed performance is an exciting new way of
achieving growth.
5

8. EARLY EXPERIMENTS
WITH GOOGLE ADWORDS
DYNAMIC SEARCH ADS
An eSearchVision Whitepaper
December 2012-12-10
UK
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+44 (0) 203 651 3500
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