The concept of dynamically produced search campaigns isn’t new and there are multiple technologies that provide this type of functionality. The difference is that these technologies come at a price, are often complex to utilise and to ensure accuracy often tie into a database rather than scraping information from a page.

With Google opening its doors to additional advertisers I would like to think that anyone in travel, retail or classified advertising are asking to be a part of its Dynamic Search Adverts test - https://services.google.com/fb/forms/dsabetainterest/.

As good as it seems and as much as we’re hearing stories of fantastic results I would tread carefully. Baris Gultekin, director of AdWords product management, says of one advertiser; ‘saw a 50% increase in conversions at an average cost-per-conversion that’s 73% less than their normal search ads.’ Sounds too good to be true but I’ll certainly be hoping that I can be a part of this new test.

Leaving so much in the hands of the advertising medium and in fact in technology scares me. As always there are fail safes allowing the advertiser to pick the pages that the system works or does not work on. I also understand that your current and static campaign is more likely to show than the DSA part of it. Putting that aside I’d be concerned about the search phrases the system would chose to show my adverts against. We’ve all seen the keyword tool suggest keywords that are totally unrelated to the keywords we’ve entered. There are also those terms that span multiple verticals and without a consumer using a long search string are impossible to know what vertical interests them.

Another area that I’d be keen to understand is tracking especially is the tracking requires the use of encoded url’s. I’ve seen the ‘url builder’ tool and although it looks easy to use tracking is never a smooth process.

To conclude I think it’s great and as always with Google the functionality will improve meaning that by the time its fully released it will be awesome. I also believe that it needs to be closely monitored and controlled to ensure the decisions it is making fit your requirements. The key thing to remember is that the fundamental of any success search campaign is a well structure and intelligent account.