Google Dynamic Search Ads Suck

As my first post to Indie Hackers, I thought I'd try to be useful and hopefully help someone dodge one particularly bad piece of advice the google ads reps love to give... Google Dynamic Search Ads!

What The Google Reps tell you:

Simply add your landing page into the campaign settings and forget having to write copy or come up with keywords. We’ll figure it all out for you and drive the most possible conversions!

The reality:

Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) and Dynamic Ad Groups as part of the same system are one of the most damaging ‘optimisations’ to be recommended in my humble opinion.

Google scrapes your landing page for words and sets those as keywords and then tries to grab headers/phrases and tests them as headlines and descriptions as your advert.

This damages your targeting by most often just setting far too vague broad match keywords and loads of brand keywords that all lead to massive amounts of wasted investment on bad search terms.

If you use them across many ad groups too you often end up with all the ad groups competing against each other on just branded terms as they're of course the most common on any page of your site.

It also creates horrendous adverts with copy weakly put together clearly by a robot.

What should you do:

Make sure not to put your company website URL into the dynamic product ads section and do not set up dynamic ad groups.

We recently took over a campaign of a client using dynamic ads and within a week of starting up our new campaigns with professionally written copywriting, the click through rate rose from 4% to over 27%! That’s 6 times the number of users deciding to click through on their ad over others.

So just write your own responsive search ads and select your own keywords.

Hopefully this comes in use to someone and saves them a few google Dolla Dolla bills from waste!

If anyone thinks I'm wrong then always very happy to hear it :)