Dynamic Search Ads

Dynamic Search Ads look like other text ads that you see on Google search results pages. But in fact they’re a new way to target searches with relevant ads that link to the most appropriate landing page, all based on the content of your website. You don’t have to choose keywords, tell Google when you add a page to your website or take it down, or create an ad for each product page of your site. AdWords figures out when to show your ads based on the same indexing and relevance technologies used for Google's organic search.
How it works

AdWords uses content from your website domain to target your ads for searches


instead of keywords.


You can tell AdWords whether all pages or just specific sections should be used to target your ads by creating dynamic ad targets. Dynamic ad targets can be your whole website or specific sections of the following:
pages that belong to specific categories
pages that contain certain words
pages whose titles contain certain words
pages whose URLs contain certain strings

Using Google’s organic search index of your website, AdWords determines which searches might be relevant to the products and services offered on this website. When AdWords finds searches that are a match for your dynamic ad targets it generates a text ad in real time that links to the most appropriate page from your website. The headline is dynamically put together by taking words from the search phrase and content from the landing page used in the ad. The rest of the ad is a template that you wrote when you set up or edited your campaign.


Although Dynamic Search Ads change the way that ads are targeted for searches, they won’t impact the way that ads get ranked, the performance of your keyword-based ads, or the amount of control you have over your account.
Same ranking. When entering the auction, the ranking of a dynamic search ad is determined in the same way as keyword-based ads: the maximum cost-per-click bid that you’ve specified for the dynamic ad target and the dynamic search ad’s Quality Score using the same calculations that are used with other search ads. The cost for a click is based on your ad’s Quality Score and the AdRank of the ad just below yours, again, just like with other search ads.
Works with your keyword-based campaigns. Complementary instead of competitive, Dynamic Search Ads don’t trump keyword-based ads. Dynamic Search Ads only show when keyword-based ads for your domain aren’t eligible to run in the auction. And the performance of your Dynamic Search Ads won’t influence your keyword-based ads and vice-versa since AdWords handles the history of your Dynamic Search Ads separately from your other ads.
You’re still in control. With Dynamic Search Ads, you control the dynamic ad targets, ad templates, bids, and your budget. You can use negative keywords, like "free" or "returns," just like with traditional campaigns to avoid showing your ads on searches that don't convert into sales. And you can prevent advertising when specific words or phrases appear on the page, like "temporarily out of stock" or "sold out", when you add dynamic ad targets that exclude pages containing these words. You'll also get full reporting: see the headlines and landing pages of your ads, the ad generated, average CTR and CPC, and conversion data.
Who should use Dynamic Search Ads

You’ll probably get the most value from Dynamic Search Ads if you operate a website with hundreds or thousands of products, services, and listings that frequently change. Do you currently map keywords, bids, and ad text to each product listing on your website? Dynamic Search Ads can help you get more complete ad exposure for more of what you sell, while reducing the effort of keeping your ads, keywords, and destination URLs current.

PostRank Combines Google Analytics With Social Media Stats

Traditional web analytics tools like Google Analytics are a great for both small and large bloggers and publishers. However, traffic data can only tell you so much. As conversations surrounding blog posts start to take in place other places (Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc.) and people use tumble blogs like Tumblr and Posterous to quickly comment and share helpful information, tracking that data and its correlation to overall traffic numbers can become really, really helpful.For smaller publishers or bloggers, getting all of this information in one place can be difficult. Today, PostRank is publicly launching PostRank Analytics as a way to capture social engagement and traditional metrics all in one place.

When you sign-up for a PostRank Analytics account, you just need to enter in your blog address and connect your Google Analytics account. You can also enter in your Twitter username, so that your Twitter follower stats can be monitored in tandem with your web traffic.

What PostRank Analytics does is take the Google Analytics data and show you the pageviews, Twitter followers and “engagement score” for the day before. You can see how your figures stand up over time, by week, month or quarter.

But that’s just the beginning. The really cool part about PostRank Analytics comes when you evaluate individual blog entries. Not only can you see your total page views, unique visitors, bounce rate and average time on the post for each entry — you can also see how many people have tweeted about the post, how many comments it received, if there are any FriendFeed or Reddit reactions, was it re-posted on Tumblr, etc.
You can also see all of those reactions underneath the post. You get points for engagement and you can quickly determine which posts have high engagement scores and which don’t. What’s nice about this system is that you can compare the raw traffic metrics against the level of social engagement. So you might notice that something is a strong traffic performer, but has lower engagement details. Or maybe something is the opposite.

You can also see what types of posts tend to work best on what types of networks, and what impact that has on your traffic number or Twitter followers.

Earlier this week, I wrote about a new study that said 84% of social media programs don’t measure ROI. Although blogging is only one aspect of social media, it’s one of the easiest ways to measure feedback.

PostRank Analytics is a great add-on to Google’s own data. I would love to see the service monitor other types of social media accounts (like Facebook friends or fans) or plug into other analytics engines, but the data that PageRank Analytics can offer already is fantastic.

You can sign-up for a free 30-day test drive. Pricing starts at $9 a month after that.

How do you measure your blog and social metrics?