What are Google Ads DSA campaigns?

Google DSA campaigns stand for Google Dynamic Search Ads. As the name suggests, these are dynamic ads.

Where in a traditional Google Ads campaign you would create a series of campaigns and ads based on a set of search terms and then tailor your ads accordingly, with DSA campaigns this process is dynamic.

How dynamic ads differ from traditional campaigns

When I say that DSA campaigns are dynamic, it’s not just the ad text or headline that is dynamic. The specific search terms you advertise on are dynamic as well.

Google crawls your website and checks which products and services appear on your site, then shows ads for relevant search terms.

However, you can tell Google Ads which pages, categories, or URLs you want your DSAs to target.

How to set up a Google Ads DSA campaign

• Create a DSA campaign when setting up a search campaign
• Target “all pages” within an ad group
• Exclude pages you don’t want to advertise on (such as blogs, info pages, or other non-sales pages)
• Add relevant audiences for Google to work with

Benefits of Google Ads DSA campaigns

As you might expect, your website needs to be well optimized for Google to tailor ads and show you on the right search terms.

Fortunately, many skilled marketers have mastered this. For large webshops with many products or categories, DSA campaigns can be extremely effective.

They allow you to show “tailored” ads for a wide range of searches you otherwise wouldn’t have the manpower to manually create ads for.

Disadvantages of dynamic search ads

The obvious downside is that when you automate something, you lose a lot of control.

You’re not involved in every single campaign, so errors or misunderstandings can occur in the ads—things you as a marketer would have caught if you were managing everything manually.