Helen Gillbe | Media Planning and Strategy
The advancements in search over the last twenty years by Google has been phenomenal. More recently machine learning in Search has become a big focus for Google Adwords. It helps to drive relevance through the use of Data and Technology in understanding user’s intent, context, and identity to make smarter decisions in real time.
Following an in-depth audit of our classical search activity in Q4 FY17, we made the bold decision to stop running paid search in France as it simply wasn’t performing. Knowing that search is the ‘go to’ channel for almost all of our customers we knew that this was not a long-term solution. Working closely with our account team at Google and DWA, we decided to test the concept of dynamic search ads (DSA)
What’s the deal with these New Dynamic Search Ads?
DSAs allow advertisers to use their website to target their ads by using Google’s organic web crawling technology to index their website. When someone searches on Google with terms closely related to the titles and used phrases on our website, Google Ads will us these titles and phrases to select the landing page and generate a relevant ad.
The advantages of DSA include:
Time saving on management of keywords, Ad copy and translations, it removes this requirement and automatically sets based on what it identifies on your site.
Dynamically generated headlines offer additional relevance, thereby improving click-through-rates and therefore quality score.
Dynamically generated final URLs can contribute to improved conversion rates and a lower cost-per-action through maximum relevance to the search.
Initially some industry experts were cautious of DSA as they felt it meant you would lose control of your account, however for the little bit of control we would give up, we’re able to gain back incremental search traffic with fairly minimal effort and with more confidence than if we simply added a lot of broad match keywords to our account.
Let's Test the Concept!
The EMEAR media team were truly excited by this new concept as it enabled us to move from the classical Cisco Centric approach to search to a user relevant approach. In Q4 FY18 we decided to better understand the benefits of DSA for Cisco and run a pilot in France. Within days of setting the pilot live the results we saw far exceeded our expectations and at the end of the quarter we saw a -80% in CPC, x2.5 improvement in CTR and x8 increase in conversions.
With such phenomenal results, it quickly became apparent that we needed to transition other EMEAR countries from classical search to dynamic search ads. And so we worked in partnership with DWA to transition Switzerland, Poland, Netherlands, Italy and Spain. Similarly the results that were generated surpassed our expectations: Today, the transition to DSA continues with UK, Germany, Russia and the Middle East in the process of migrating. It is safe to say, Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) are becoming a powerful piece of our Cisco EMEAR paid search strategy.
As mentioned above DSA has a heavy dependency on organic web crawling technology, consequently now more than ever, it is critical that Cisco.com has a rich depth of SEO compliant content focused on our product portfolio. Google’s organic web crawling technology will recognise this and automatically target those searching for our key products and services. This ultimately means casting aside the traditional keyword and letting Google do the targeting for us.
Back to my original question, can we say goodbye to the keyword?
So, if DSA works, why would we bother with keywords? If you can get the same (or better) results without generating thousands of keywords yourself, what’s the catch? Could you not just use a series of DSA campaigns covering your entire website inventory to drive efficiency? As profound as DSA is, this is unfortunately not entirely the case from a Cisco perspective as lots of our pages don’t have a sufficient depth of content (eloqua pages for example) and this is why the EMEAR search strategy moving forward will include a combination of DSA and Classical search in retargeting.
In the campaigns that we have created so far, we can clearly see that DSA works where we have content rich pages, that enable google to define a relevant set of keywords. For our demand generation, Eloqua pages, we still need to generate a list of keywords that will help us to drive conversions on our campaigns pages.
Ok, so keywords are not dying entirely YET, but DSA’s take the task of managing keyword lists, ad copy and translations out of the equation.
To learn more about Dynamic Search Ads contact Helen Gillbe or Marianne Seye-Precetti
