Google's advertising platform seems to add & take away things all the time.
Many times it may seem Google wants to take away all control from the account manager.
How can you maintain control, while also working with Google?
Landing Pages
How does a dynamic search ad work?
Dynamic ads use Google AI and your past account history to optimize for your campaign goal, given your bidding strategy.
The biggest difference with Dynamic ads is there can be multiple landing page destinations per ad.
You can have Google choose between all pages on your website or you can select a few key pages you want to focus on. Then each time your dynamic ad is clicked by someone, Google will send them to the landing page that will most likely impact your campaign goal.
Tip: You can choose to run dynamic ads to discover landing pages that convert better than others. Additionally, you can optimize the landing pages that do not perform as well as you would like.
Writing the Ad
These ads dynamically populate your 1-3 headlines every time your ad is shown. The headlines come from the content that is on your landing page.
Because your headlines come from your landing page content it is important that your landing page h1, h2's, and h3's are good and incorporate high performance keywords!
Your ad also has 2 descriptions that you write yourself. I usually try to make these descriptions generic enough that no matter what headline the ad chooses to show it makes sense.
Targeting
Dynamic ads use the same campaign targeting (location, schedule, demographic, etc…) that you have set up for your original search ads.
What! No Keywords?
That's right! Dynamic ads do not use keywords to show your ad. Instead, Google's AI and your past account history is used to look for intent rather than matching keywords per search query.
You can still see which keywords people searched for when your ad showed. And if you do not like the keywords that your ad is showing up for you can still make them negative keywords.
Best Practice is to constantly watch your Dynamic ad closely the first 2 weeks it is running and create your negative keyword list.
Tip: You can choose to run dynamic ads to discover new keywords that you had not previously thought of.
Optimize Your Campaign with A Dynamic Ad Group
Best practice is to add a Dynamic ad group to an existing campaign. Doing so will allow your campaign to optimize itself better.
For example, if someone searches "professional carpet cleaning" Google will look at both your original search ad group (containing the keyword) & your dynamic ad group. Whichever ad group has the ad with the highest ad rank will show to the searcher.
There you have it! A quick breakdown of what Dynamic Ads are and how they can be used!