For any of you who spend a majority of your day agonizing over keyword lists and campaigns, you may be shocked to hear that your efforts may soon be superfluous. 

The newly released functionality of Google’s Dynamic Search Ads (or DSA’s as Google Refers to them) is to help alleviate the sometimes monolithic keyword lists we compile when trying to generate search ads for the Adwords network. 

For instance, let’s say you’re a huge producer of manufactured goods like, Ikea Furniture. You have literally tens of thousands of items for sale, many with the same keywords, like couch, but with an almost infinite number of permutations to address all the different kinds of couches you have to offer. Until now, you had to create keyword lists and campaigns to address the kind of couch, (Sectional, sleeper, futon etc.) the style of couch, (mid-century, contemporary, baroque, etc) the surface, (leather, fabric, microsuede etc.) and then the color. All of which makes for some pretty tedious and time consuming work.

Enter Google’s newly revised DSA campaign platform.

Through this improved Google product, the company will index your multiple websites, categorize each individual page and then the content found within each of those pages, just as they’ve always done, but now they’re going to tie that content to your ad rather than a keyword campaign. 

It works like this: Let’s say I’m sitting at home and decide that I’m in the market for a new stylish couch. When I search “new stylish couches” within Google, up pops the traditional search results page. A few of the ads catch my eye because the headlines match almost verbatim to what I’ve put in as my search query. Now when I click on an ad, it doesn't take me to a home page for that furniture store, but rather takes me directly to the page where I see exactly the contemporary styled couches I’m looking to buy. 

For managers of PPC keyword lists, this might generate a certain amount of anxiety, but in reality, it eliminates (in most instances) the need to do exhaustive keyword campaigns against any and all manner of product nuances in order to generate your ad campaigns effectively. Google is essentially dynamically mirroring the search query for the headline, populating the ad with the relevant link to the page needed based on the content you’ve provided, and serving the ad based on the same bidding formula you’ve come to know and love. 

The big issue that this will invariably draw attention to, is how your website was built. This is a completely separate topic that I could spend several posts discussing, but the actual tagging and metadata included in your site is now more important than ever and it will only continue in this direction until Google has essentially made everyone optimize their sites to fit how their algorithms efficiently crawl the web. 

What I think is interesting is that this has already been done with general content. I was speaking a few months ago with an SEO consultant who referenced that pages without titles or with the same title across an entire site were being renamed by Google dynamically as they were being posted as search results to help drive more uptake by users. So essentially, if Google thinks that the content on your page is more relevant to the query than most other options, they will take the time to “beautify” the page for you so that a user is more likely to click on it. 

They are in essence removing human error from the process entirely. And it won’t be much longer before the same is true for the campaigns we’re going to create. I could see in the not too distant future, you’ll logon to Google and just tell them that you have X amount of dollars to spend and this is the site that I want to drive traffic to, and the whole campaign will take care of itself. We’re not there yet, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that is where they’re headed conceptually.