Existing Dynamic Search Ad campaigns may be eligible to upgrade to Performance Max, bringing you additional inventory and formats to reach new customers. Advertisers who upgrade DSA campaigns to Performance Max see an average increase of over 15% in conversions or conversion value at a similar cost per action (CPA) or return on ad spend (ROAS). Learn how to Upgrade Dynamic Search Ads to Performance Max (Beta).
Increasing your reach without keywords, targeting for Dynamic Search Ads works by matching people’s searches on Google with specific pages on your site. You’re in control of how this targeting works. You can target your ads based on specific categories that reflect the structure of your website, or target all the pages of your website. You can also create additional types of dynamic ad targets or block pages using dynamic ad target exclusions.
This article describes the 8 types of dynamic ad targets you can use to refine how we'll show your ads. For a broader overview, start with About Dynamic Search Ads. Remember that you are responsible for the final text that appears in your ad, so keep this in mind when choosing your landing pages.
Target types
Landing pages from your standard ad groups
The “Landing pages from your standard ad groups” category includes all webpages that you’re currently running search ads against, across your account. This targeting option makes it easy to increase traffic on the webpages that you’re already using as landing pages in existing ad groups and campaigns. We recommend this for advertisers who are new to Dynamic Search Ads and want more traffic that this type of targeting can add. This option is available only in accounts with eligible landing pages in their standard ad groups.
Example
You have a website about electronics, and you’re currently running search ads that are directing people to the “Cameras” page. To expand your reach with users searching for queries relevant to this page, target the “Landing pages from your standard ad groups” category.
URL targeting
URL Equals
You can target specific URLs. However, if the URL contains tracking parameters, these might be treated as a new link, and URL Equals may not be a true fit for exclusions in such cases.
Example
You want to drive more traffic to the “Clearance” page on your website, so you target the specific URL for that page. This is also a great option for excluding specific pages on your site.
URL Contains
You can target pages with URLs that contain a certain piece of text, called a token. In a URL, a token is surrounded by a limiter like “/”, “-” among others.
Example
You want to target all the services-related pages of your electronics website based on the URL string that appears when you navigate the site. If all of those URLs follow a similar pattern, like electronicsexample.com/services/, you should target every one that contains "services."
Note that it won’t work for URLs like electronicsexample.com/servicesmenu/, because it has the word “menu” after the targeted text. However it will work for electronicsexample.com/services-menu/ because the “-” is a separator. Other separators include ‘:’ ‘/’ ‘?’ ‘+’ and ‘&’.
Custom label
You can use a page feed to create a list of URLs you want to target, then attach custom labels to your URLs to organize them. You can use the Custom Label targets to target or exclude these subsets of your page feed. Learn how to Use a feed to target Dynamic Search Ads and Performance Max.
Example
You want to make a campaign for digital cameras with 4-star ratings. You’ve attached a feed to your campaign and used the feed to label all your 4-star camera URLs “FOUR_STAR”. In Google Ads, you target custom labels, and enter “FOUR_STAR” as a custom label.
Other targeting types
All webpages
All webpages includes every single page in your website's domain that are discovered by Google's search and ad crawlers (programs that automatically discover and scan websites by following links from one webpage to another).
Example
You have a website about electronics, electronicsexample.com. To target all pages in electronicsexample.com, target all webpages.If you choose to use all webpages and there are pages to which you never wish to drive search ads traffic, we recommend adding them as negative Dynamic Ad Targets. Learn how to Create exclusions for Dynamic Search Ads.
Page title
You can target pages with titles that contain certain words. If you don’t know what a page title is, hover over your browser tab and a tooltip should appear to show the title of your page. Be careful when you use Page title targeting with caution as it can be prone to error.
Example
You want to target pages with titles that contain certain words, like "cameras." To target pages by this title, add a target page title containing the word "cameras."
Page content
You can target pages that contain certain words that you specify.
Example
You want to use all pages that contain the phrase "digital cameras" to target your ads. To target pages by content, add a group of webpages. Select the Page_Content option, then enter “digital cameras.”
Categories
Based on your website content, Google creates targetable categories, or sets of landing pages organized by theme. You decide which sets of pages to target, how to group similar pages, and the level of granularity. Keep in mind that categories may take up to 24 hours to populate after you set up your Dynamic ad group.
Example
You have a website about electronics and you’d like to target pages that are selling digital cameras. Dynamic Search Ads will organize your website into categories using Google AI, that are customized to your products and services such as "digital cameras," "televisions," and "video recorders." To target pages by categories, use Categories recommended for your website. Based on your site, you’ll have a dynamic ad target for digital cameras. You can also use the search box above the category view to search for categories outside of our recommended category set, even if they’re not listed.