Dynamic Search Ads – initial experiences

Dynamic Search Ads, part of the AdWords system, theoretically could partly solve a problem that large ecommerce sites have: that of running ad inventory to match all stock items in a way that reflects new lines / SKUs as well as deals with items going out of stock.

I’ve just set up my first Dynamic Search Ads campaign for a client who sells electronic goods and there were several things I found confusing. The first thing I wanted to do was to stop any ads running for items that were out of stock. You can theoretically do this by going into the exclusion part of the settings in your new Campaign and creating one or more exclusions. You can for example exclude any URLS that include the word “help”, or any web pages where the content includes the words “not in stock”.

I discussed this last item with my Google rep earlier because I was not clear whether I could use a sort of “phrase match” negative here.

Suppose for example my client had copy on the page that said “Not available anywhere else” and somewhere else on the page “In stock”. Would that page get excluded? It shouldn’t but at the moment, Google doesn’t make this clear. But then it is early days for Dynamic Search Ads.

The second thing I noticed was that Google automatically suggested a range of content that the ads should target but at the moment I’m not clear where it got its suggestions from. The other thing which is frustrating at the moment is that, although my rep thinks I have got everything sorted out, the ads aren’t running and are showing no signs of doing so yet.

I’ll keep you posted!

Categories PPC