If you’ve been running Adwords for a while, you may well have come across something called “dynamic search ads”.

Google may have been adding recommendations to use these ad formats in your dashboard, making it much easier for you to start using them, so I thought I’d just drop out a quick note to make it clear exactly what they are, and why you should be very careful before considering using them.

In a nutshell: dynamic search ads use your landing page content to decide whether to show your ad for a specific search term, without you having to plug in specific keywords and manually build an ad.

For example, say you run a dog-boarding kennel.

A normal search campaign would see you bidding on keywords like “Dog boarding kennels near me” or “dog boarding”.

But with dynamic ads, it’s not about your keywords.

Instead, Google will use your website content, and make the decision whether to show your ad for a particular search term based on that.

So if your website isn’t correctly optimised and heavily focused around PPC topics, an advert could trigger if someone searches for something like, “holidays I can take my dog on” – completely the wrong sort of search to for a dog kennel to be targeting.

(This is an example I’ve actually seen live.)

Dynamic search is something Google offer with good intent – in theory, they can help you expand your reach and get to more people, but unless you know exactly what you’re doing, then you need to be very careful dabbling in them.

Dynamic ads really come into their own if you’re looking at driving high traffic volume, that isn’t focused on specific keyword searches (brand building campaigns) or if you run an e-commerce store and you want to rank for specific products.

If that isn’t the case for your business, my broad advice would be to steer clear of them.

Hope this helps – if you need to chat it through, just let me know,

Tash