Working with an advertiser has its perks. Sometimes everything is fine as you are managing the entire business in your country and you have an eye on almost everything related to Paid Search. Sometimes (most of the time to be honest) you don’t control as much as you want and even worse, you don’t have any visibility on what is going outside of your scope. In the worst case scenario, the other partners (or agencies) are blocking you. What can you do in this case to still provide your client an outstanding performance? The answer might come from Dynamic Search Ads.
More Context
We recently onboarded a client working in a highly precise niche with the mandate of managing only a part of their business in Canada. The other part would be still managed in the U.S. for now. Since the product was specific and only a few would search through exact research, we had to expand our keywords list to garner consistent traffic.
We made an extensive list of negative keywords to remain as efficient as possible and not harm the other products of the company. After a successful launch, the traffic was not coming at all (we saw a decrease of 80% year over year) and after checking and re-checking our settings and setup we came to the conclusion that this was coming from something unexpected. After a lot of back-and-forth with the client, we realized that the other agencies didn’t use as many precise keywords as we did. The list of their negatives was not as extensive as ours, and they were bidding higher than us (the historical data was in their favour as well) and that’s why they were showing more often and even on our queries.
We didn’t want to start an auction war as we always keep the performance of the client in mind when making optimizations. We had to think of something else.
Dynamic Search Ads – The Long Awaited Savior
For those not familiar with the Dynamic Search Ads, it is a type of AdWords campaign that will scan specific parts of your website and automatically generate a list of keywords and a Headline + Display URL for your ads. The internal auction will always give the advantage to an ad triggered by a keyword versus a Dynamic Search Ads (more relevancy, etc.) so we decided to keep the Branded campaigns running and pause the Generic ones. The general idea behind this strategy was to be able to show for keywords that neither the other agencies nor us would have thought of.
After the classic ramp-up period, the results started to come in and what we saw was an outstanding performance:
- Clicks increased by 70.5% (even with a budget 26.7% smaller)
- CTR increased by 162%
- Average CPC decreased by 57%
- Average position went from 1.5 to 1.3
- Conversions increased by 113%
- Cost per conversion decreased by 65.5%
Conclusion
We managed with this specific feature of AdWords to navigate around the worst problem possible – competition. Even if you might have trouble implementing this type of campaign (it really depends on the structure of your website), you should consider testing DSAs. As always, the best way to get out of a tricky situation is to test new features and keep the client educated on what is happening.
About The Author
Alexandre Valadon is a Paid Media Advisor at iProspect. He’s been working in the PPC industry for more than 3 years and is starving to push the boundaries of optimization. He also likes restructuring account to always provide better performance to his clients. Connect with Alexandre on Linkedin.
