Google Ads: Dynamic Search Ads

Creating a separate ad for every page of your website is the ideal. For businesses with large or frequently changing content, it’s simply not realistic to do manually.

Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) solve that problem by crawling your website and automatically generating ad headlines and landing pages that match what people are actually searching for, without requiring a single keyword from you.

The result is a DSA campaign that surfaces your business for relevant queries your standard keyword campaigns almost certainly missed.

DSA campaigns are still fully available in Google Ads as of 2025. If you’re starting fresh, it’s worth understanding how DSA works and where Google is steering things. More on that later.

This article covers how Dynamic Search Ads work, how to set them up, the best practices that actually move the needle, and who should be using them.

How Dynamic Search Ads Work

At a technical level, DSA campaigns work by sending Google’s crawler across your website to analyse page content, then matching that content to user search queries in real time.

When a match is found, Google dynamically generates an ad headline pulled from your page title and serves it alongside a landing page URL pointed directly at the relevant page.

This is the part most advertisers get wrong. Google generates the headline and chooses the landing page. You write the descriptions.

That distinction matters enormously. The description lines (up to 90 characters each) are the only creative input you have in a DSA.

The headline draws primarily from the page’s HTML tag, which Google treats as the most important signal. H1 tags and body content phrases feed in as secondary sources.

If your title tags are vague, keyword-stuffed, or poorly written, your DSA headlines will reflect that. There’s nothing you can do about it at the campaign level.

This is also why good on-page SEO and DSA performance are directly linked. DSA campaigns use the same organic crawl index that powers Google Search results.

A well-optimised website is the actual input to a DSA campaign. It’s a fundamentally different relationship to advertising than traditional keyword campaigns.

Fixing a page title doesn’t just help your rankings. It improves your ad headlines too.

There are two crawling mechanisms at play. The standard organic index (Googlebot) picks up changes to your site content within roughly 7-10 days.

The faster path is a page feed: a spreadsheet of specific URLs uploaded to Google Ads. Google’s AdsBot crawler processes new feed URLs within a day and revisits active pages every 2-3 days.

For large or frequently updated sites, page feeds are the right approach and worth setting up properly.

Setting Up Dynamic Search Ads

Getting a DSA campaign live takes minutes. Once you’re in your Google Ads account, follow these steps.

Step 1: Create a Campaign

Click "Create campaign" in your Google Ads account. You’ll be prompted to select a campaign objective and type.

Step 2: Select the Campaign Type

Select "Search" as your campaign type, then choose your bidding strategy. Fill in campaign settings including location, languages, and audience segments.

Step 3: Enable Dynamic Search Ads

Scroll to "More settings" to find the Dynamic Search Ads section and enter your website domain. If you don’t see it immediately, look under "Additional campaign settings."

Google has progressively buried this option in the interface, which tells you something about where the product is headed.

Step 4: Create a Dynamic Ad Group

When creating your ad group, switch the type from "Standard" to "Dynamic." This unlocks dynamic ad targets in place of keywords.

Step 5: Define Your Targeting

Choose which pages on your site are eligible for ad serving. Once targeting is set, write your description lines, define your budget, and publish. The campaign typically begins serving within 24-48 hours on a new domain.

Targeting Options in a DSA Campaign

Dynamic ad targets are what DSA uses instead of keywords. They tell Google which pages of your website are eligible to be matched against search queries.

You have more control here than most advertisers use. The main targeting options are:

• All webpages: targets every crawlable page on your domain. The broadest option and the riskiest without proper negative targets in place.
• Specific categories: Google AI generates thematic categories from your site content, for example "emergency plumbing" or "hot water systems." A practical middle ground for most businesses.
• URL contains / URL equals: targets pages based on URL patterns. Targeting "URL contains /services/" precisely scopes your DSA to service pages only.
• Page title or page content contains: targets pages based on words in the title tag or body content. Useful, but prone to unintended matches if your content isn’t tightly written.
• Page feed: targets specific URLs from an uploaded spreadsheet. The most precise option, and the one large sites and ecommerce stores should default to.

Up to three conditions can be combined within a single target using AND logic. For example, URL contains "/services/" AND page title contains "emergency."

Multiple targets can run within the same ad group. When several are eligible for a query, Google serves the most relevant landing page.

Page feeds deserve special attention. A page feed is a two-column spreadsheet (page URL and custom label) uploaded to Google Ads under Business Data.

Each URL can carry up to 20 custom labels. Tags like "high-margin," "on-sale," or "in-stock" let you create precisely scoped ad groups without URL pattern gymnastics.

For anyone running DSA on a site with more than a few hundred pages, page feeds are the difference between a campaign you control and one that goes rogue.

Benefits of Dynamic Search Ads

The two things DSA does better than any other Search campaign type are keyword coverage and campaign velocity.

On coverage: research consistently shows that roughly 70% of ecommerce searches come from long-tail queries that manual keyword lists never capture. DSA automatically targets relevant search queries across that long tail.

Not because someone thought to add them, but because your website content already covers the topic. That’s a genuinely different model to traditional search advertising.

For sites with meaningful content depth, the incremental traffic adds up fast.

On velocity: a DSA campaign can be live in minutes. There’s no keyword research phase, no ad copy brainstorming for dozens of ad groups, no match type decisions.

For businesses that need search coverage quickly, DSA compresses the timeline dramatically. Think a new service launch, a seasonal push, or a competitor gap you want to close.

The catch, as always, is that DSA is only as good as the website behind it. A poorly structured site with thin content and weak title tags will produce irrelevant ads and wasted spend.

The tool amplifies what’s already there, good or bad.

Maximising the Effectiveness of Dynamic Search Ads

The difference between a DSA campaign that generates real leads and one that burns through budget comes down to a few disciplines that most advertisers skip. Here’s what actually matters.

1. Negative Keywords Come First

Before your DSA campaign goes live, build a comprehensive negative keyword list. Mirror your exact match keywords from existing standard campaigns into it as negatives.

DSA will happily target the same search terms as your keyword campaigns, regardless of what Google’s documentation says about priority. Preventing that cannibalisation is the single most important structural decision in a DSA setup.

If you’re thinking about how best to structure these ad groups alongside your standard campaigns, STAG vs. SKAG campaign structures is worth reading before you build.

Once the campaign is running, review your search terms report regularly and add low-relevance queries as negatives. Sort by impressions first. That surfaces the biggest volume problems fastest.

The goal is a DSA campaign that genuinely finds new territory, not one that competes with itself.

2. Use Negative Dynamic Ad Targets

Negative keywords handle the query side. Negative dynamic ad targets handle the page side.

These exclude specific URLs from being used as landing pages, which is a critical distinction. There are pages on almost every website that should never appear in a paid ad: privacy policy pages, terms and conditions, careers listings, login screens, blog category archives, and any page with out-of-stock or unavailable products.

The cleanest way to manage this at scale is URL-pattern exclusions. Excluding "URL contains /blog/" or "URL contains /careers/" removes entire site sections in a single rule.

For ecommerce, adding a page content exclusion for phrases like "out of stock" or "currently unavailable" automatically drops depleted products from targeting as they’re updated. No ongoing manual management required.

3. Value-Based Bidding

DSA is built for automation, and its bidding strategy should match. Maximise Conversion Value (Target ROAS) suits ecommerce. Maximise Conversions (Target CPA) works well for lead generation.

Both strategies require adequate conversion data to function properly. Target ROAS wants at least 50 conversions in the last 30 days before it starts performing reliably, while Target CPA needs a minimum of 15-30.

Manual CPC on a DSA campaign is usually a mistake. The value of DSA is that Google’s system matches page content to search queries in real time. Pairing that with manual bidding removes the automation layer that makes the whole thing useful.

4. Layer Remarketing Audiences

Stacking remarketing audiences onto a DSA campaign, often called RDSA (Remarketing for Dynamic Search Ads), is one of the most effective and underused setups in paid search.

When a previous site visitor searches for something your site covers, DSA serves a dynamically generated ad pointed at the exact relevant page.

Studies have shown RDSA generating significantly higher click-through rates and lower CPAs compared to standard RLSA. The combination of intent signal (the search) and prior behaviour (the visit) is unusually strong.

If you haven’t set up Google remarketing yet, that’s worth doing before you attempt RDSA.

Apply audiences in Observation mode if you’re using Smart Bidding. This gives the algorithm the signal without artificially restricting reach. Switch to Targeting mode only if you want a pure RDSA campaign limited exclusively to known visitors.

5. Exclude or Optimise Underperforming Pages

When users land on a page that doesn’t deliver on what the ad implied, they leave. That’s wasted spend, and it hurts your Quality Score over time.

Review your landing page performance in the search terms report, cross-reference it with the dynamic ad targets view, and exclude pages that consistently underperform.

A poor landing page experience is a liability in a DSA campaign. Even if a page is technically crawlable, it shouldn’t be in your targeting if it doesn’t convert.

6. Use Promotional Campaigns and Offers Strategically

DSA pulls page titles to generate headlines. If your service or product pages feature time-limited offers or promotions in the title or on-page copy, DSA will reflect that automatically.

You can reinforce this in your description lines. Highlight the specific offer, create urgency, or address the objection you know that page’s visitors typically have.

The system handles the matching. The description is your moment to close.

DSA for Ecommerce

DSA and Shopping campaigns are not competitors. They serve different ad formats and different purposes.

Shopping campaigns display product listing ads with images, prices, and ratings drawn from your Merchant Center feed. DSA generates text ads drawn from your website content. They can and should run alongside each other.

For ecommerce businesses, DSA’s primary role is coverage on search queries that neither your keyword campaigns nor Shopping ads are capturing.

The long-tail problem is particularly acute in ecommerce. The sheer variety of ways people search for products makes exhaustive keyword coverage impossible without automation. DSA fills that gap.

DSA does not read your Merchant Center feed and has no awareness of stock levels. If a product page still exists on your site but the item is sold out, DSA will happily target it and send buyers to a dead end.

Managing this through page content exclusions or a maintained page feed is non-negotiable for active ecommerce DSA campaigns.

For stores with large catalogues, a well-optimised Shopping feed and a DSA page feed structured around the same product categories create consistent reporting across both campaign types and simplify budget allocation.

Where DSA Is Heading

DSA is still live in Google Ads with no formal deprecation announced. But the direction of travel is obvious.

In May 2025, Google launched AI Max for Search Campaigns, which it explicitly describes as an evolution of DSA. AI Max is a toggle within existing Search campaigns that enables keywordless matching, dynamically generated ad copy, and AI-driven final URL expansion.

It does everything DSA does, but woven directly into the main Search campaign infrastructure with broader AI capabilities on top.

Before that, in July 2023, Google introduced a voluntary upgrade tool to migrate DSA campaigns across to Performance Max, claiming an average 15% lift in conversions for advertisers who made the switch. Microsoft Advertising followed the same path in early 2025 with its own DSA-to-PMax upgrade option.

If you’re managing an existing DSA campaign that’s performing, there’s no urgent reason to pull the pin. Plan for an eventual transition, though.

If you’re building new campaigns from scratch, evaluating AI Max first is the smarter starting point.

The underlying principle hasn’t changed. Your website content is the input, and the quality of that content determines what the system can do with it. That’s true of DSA, AI Max, and every AI-driven ad format Google has announced since.

FAQ

What does the advertiser provide in a Dynamic Search Ad?

The description lines. That’s it.

Google generates the headline from your page’s title tag and selects the landing page based on query relevance. You write one or two descriptions of up to 90 characters each, which is your only direct creative input.

This is fundamentally different from Responsive Search Ads, where you supply up to 15 headlines and Google tests combinations. With DSA, the headline is entirely Google’s work, driven by your on-page content.

What is the difference between Dynamic Search Ads and traditional search ads?

Two major differences: how targeting works, and who writes the headline.

Traditional Search campaigns require you to specify keywords and write all ad copy. DSA uses your website content as the targeting mechanism, with no keywords required, and auto-generates the headline from your page titles.

Bidding also differs: rather than bidding at the keyword level, you bid at the dynamic ad target level (the page or page group you’re targeting). Both charge on a cost-per-click basis, but the campaign architecture is meaningfully different.

Do Dynamic Search Ads work on Bing?

Yes. Microsoft Advertising offers Dynamic Search Ads across Bing, Yahoo, AOL, DuckDuckGo, and its partner network. Campaigns can be imported directly from Google Ads.

One notable difference is that Microsoft DSA supports static headlines. This gives advertisers the option to retain full control over headline copy while still using DSA’s automated targeting, which Google’s version doesn’t offer.

Microsoft has also followed Google’s lead in offering DSA-to-Performance Max upgrades, though it has confirmed DSA campaigns will remain available in the platform.

Are Dynamic Search Ads suitable for all types of businesses?

DSA is most powerful for businesses with substantial, well-structured website content. That includes large ecommerce stores, service businesses with extensive location or category pages, and any site where the product or service range is too broad to cover with manual keywords.

Smaller businesses advertising a narrow range of products or services will typically get better results from tightly managed standard Search campaigns where every keyword, match type, and ad is deliberate.

The minimum viable condition for DSA isn’t page count. It’s content quality. A site with 40 well-written, properly titled service pages can run a strong DSA campaign. A site with 400 thin, keyword-stuffed pages will produce irrelevant ads regardless of scale.

Anastasia Paraskevos

Ana has been working in the world of Facebook and Google Ads for almost a decade. She has her finger on the pulse of every algorithm update, content requirement and data measurement tool, making her a master of targeting your dream customer and turning leads into conversions. With a unique skillset in the world of trades and service-based business marketing, Ana is your port of all for things pay-per-click.

Find them on their website: sitecentre®.