Microsoft who? What? That’s right, in case you’ve still been calling it good ole’ Bing Ads, the ad platform has now transitioned to Microsoft Advertising – and they’ve got a slew of other updates on deck. One of which, is a new ad format for their Dynamic Search Ads.

First, what are Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs)?

These are ads meant to automatically target relevant searches based on the content of your website.

To make a DSA campaign, you upload the landing page or category of your website you wish to target – it will be crawled so that Microsoft can auto-generate headlines for your ads, as well as understand what search queries it should be serving the ads against. With a DSA ad, the ad title, or headline, is dynamically-generated, but the description line is created by you, the advertiser.

DSA has been helpful to search advertisers when they have a very large catalogue of inventory to work with, and don’t have the means to create specific keywords sets or ads for each category or product. Advertisers use a template description line and depend on Microsoft Advertising to generate an appropriate headline and match the ad to a relevant search. The downside to saving time and finding some missed opportunities with DSA, is that sometimes it misses the mark. You need to keep a very close eye on the search queries your ads are being matched to in order to negate irrelevant terms and optimize these campaigns. Also, sometimes your ads will be terrible – with wonky headlines that just don’t flow with the rest of your ad. Hence, the update!

In July 2019, Microsoft Ads quietly announced that they now include support for an additional description line AND now allow for longer dynamically-generated headlines. With a second description line, advertisers can add in more information and stronger calls to action that better jive with the headlines and what a searcher would find on the landing page. And, though the character count for the longer ad titles is unknown at the moment, you can bet that auto-generated headlines will also be improved with more characters to work with.

Credit: Microsoft Advertising Blog

If you’re interested in testing out Dynamic Search Ads, particularly with the extended copy updates, you can create one of these campaigns from your Campaign Management tab in Microsoft ads. If you want to create these at scale, consider using Microsoft’s Bulk API function, for the more tech-savvy advertisers.

Having luck (or trouble) with DSAs? Drop us a comment below! Our team would love to hear more about your experience and how we can help.