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Get full control over your Dynamic Search Ads with static headlines

Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs) are one of the most innovative, mind-expanding tools Microsoft Advertising has to offer, and they should be part of any advertiser’s holistic strategy to drive incremental query coverage. Building out comprehensive keyword lists can be time-consuming and miss many of the ways users search, but Dynamic Search Ads expand your search marketing consciousness to connect with more customers looking for your products and services.

On average, about 90% of DSA impressions for a given DSA user are discovered from queries that were only found by DSA. Think about all the new business opportunities and search trends you can discover when you’re staying on top of all those unique long-tail queries. Combine that with the lower cost per click (CPC) and incremental click volume, and you’ll see that DSAs are a clearly powerful tool to drive successful advertiser performance.

One reason many advertisers couldn’t take full advantage of the great discovery power of DSA, though, was the customisation of the ad experience being delivered on the search engine results page (SERP). With the headlines of your DSAs being dynamically generated based on the content of your website, there was no way to get full control over the ads that were being created. That is, until now!

We teased it in our monthly blog roundup on last week, but now we’re delighted to officially announce that static headlines for DSA are now available in all markets where DSA is available (see details on About Dynamic Search Ads). This is a capability unique to Microsoft Advertising, enabling you to get all the power of DSA matching your landing pages to new and unique queries while retaining complete control over your ad content.

What are static headlines?

Put simply, static headlines are an additional column you can add to your Dynamic Search Ads page feed, which then specifies the specific ad title you want to show up for a particular URL you have in your page feed.

Product view of Dynamic Search Ad feed, with custom label and ad title columns.
DSA page feeds include a column of URLs within your domain, grouped by Custom labels (optional), and now with an Ad Title supplied for individual URLs if you want to leverage static headlines.

Since advertisers that use DSAs are already specifying the description used in the ad copy, the inclusion of Ad Title in your page feeds means you now have full control over your DSA ad copy! There’s no dynamic text insertion for the headline or anywhere else, which means any advertiser that may have had concerns of violating regulations in the past no longer needs to worry with static headlines.

Note: currently, advertisers can only add static headlines to their DSAs through a page feed. We hope to provide the ability to add them via Microsoft Advertising online in the future.

With ad descriptions already preset and headlines now static, what’s “dynamic” about DSA?

Remember, while text ads and Responsive Search Ads are leveraging the keywords you build, DSA is matching user queries based on your website content (set by the auto target rules you determine). Bing’s organic web crawling technology develops a very rich understanding of the page content that’s within the domain you specify, which then allows it to dynamically figure out which page to match it to based on the query.

In an ever-changing world where new search trends and unique queries are constantly emerging, the ability of DSAs to capture those unique long-tail queries and match them to the right content on your website can give you a huge competitive edge in the search advertising landscape.

Awesome, I’m sold! How do I get started with DSA and static headlines?

As mentioned before, you’ll need to use a page feed if you want to take advantage of static headlines. Page feeds help keep your URLs fresh so that your DSAs display the most current version of your website, as well as grant you more control over your auto-targets and ad copy.

Page feeds start with a spreadsheet like the one you see above, and to upload it you’ll need to go to Tools —> Business data —> Page feeds —>Upload.

Product view of the Tools menu, with business data dropdown displayed.

Product view of the Upload button on the page feeds page.

After your feed is uploaded, you’ll choose a specific campaign to apply to one or multiple feeds by going to Settings and navigating to the Targeting source section.

Product view of the Targeting source interface.
Note: We’ll only serve URLs for which a headline has been provided. This means that if you’d like to use URLs that aren’t in your page feed, a global headline must be provided in the feed.

You can also use page feeds in an auto target in a new ad group, or create an auto target using page feeds in an existing ad group. For more details on page feeds, see About Dynamic Search Ads page feeds.

Finally, if you’re an advertiser who already has a robust shopping feed, you can leverage that for uploading your DSA page feed! If you simply pull the product page URLs you use for targeting and remove everything else from the shopping feed, you can then use that as your page feed file where you can add your Custom label and Ad Title columns.

What else is new with DSA?

As a final reminder from a few months ago, we’re now at parity with Google Ads in terms of being able to combine standard ad groups and dynamic ad groups in the same campaign (i.e. mixed campaigns). This means that you can much more easily import your DSAs from Google Ads if you’d like, as well as just manage them more efficiently overall. For more details on importing mixed campaigns from Google Ads, check out our November blog roundup.

That’s all for now — we hope you get to take advantage of these new unique DSA capabilities in Microsoft Advertising!

Help us improve Microsoft Advertising

Your comments and feedback are integral to our ongoing efforts to shape and improve our product. For any questions or feedback, please reach out to your Microsoft Advertising account manager, or send us an email at advertising-feedback@microsoft.com. You can also interact with us on Twitter or suggest a feature on Microsoft Advertising Feature Suggestions.