If your Dynamic Search Ads aren't getting traffic, it might be because your settings are missing key information or if there are issues with your campaign and feed setup.
This article goes over some of the most common reasons why Dynamic Search Ads don’t receive traffic after initial setup and how to fix them.
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Considerations before troubleshooting Dynamic Search Ads low traffic issues
You should consider the following before proceeding to troubleshoot low traffic issues with Dynamic Search Ads:
Check date of feed or campaign creation
If there are issues with your Dynamic Search Ads, the first thing to check is the date that you created your feed or campaign.
- New Dynamic Search Ads campaigns can take up to 24–48 hours to become active and begin serving.
- New page feeds must be crawled and reviewed. Check if the feed is not still marked as 'Under review'.
Ensure that feed is set up correctly
Check to ensure that you're using the right formatting in your Dynamic Search Ads feed.
- Make sure that you use semicolons (;) to separate multiple custom labels.
- Check that targeted items in your feed are 'Approved'.
- Make sure that you don’t have a removed feed with the same name, as it might prevent ads from serving. Ads may pull data from the removed feed.
- Check for any redirects on your site. The page after the redirect page will be used for Dynamic Search Ads.
- Custom labels aren't case-sensitive. It’s okay to have different capitalisation in your feed and target.
Common reasons for issues
Issue #1: Your website domain and language or settings and target used for ad creatives were incorrectly entered
Dynamic Search Ads require a website domain (for example, example.com) and language corresponding to the pages that you want your targeted ads to be set in the campaign. To create a dynamic ad group in a search campaign, you'll need to provide your website information, website domain and language in the campaign settings.
The following domains can't be used for Dynamic Search Ads:
- Domains that redirect to a different domain
- Sites from some sensitive verticals, such as pharmaceutical, gambling and adult, may not serve with Dynamic Search Ads
- Domains without enough content to target:
- Sites that mostly contain flash content or images
- Sites that require a user to log in to access the majority of the site's content
- Sites that don't have a lot of pages indexed by Google (check your website's index status on Google)
How to fix
Check your domain and language settings:
- Sign in to your Search Ads 360 account.
- From the Page menu, select Campaigns.
- Select the campaign name that you want to change.
- Select Campaigns again and select the Settings tab.
- Scroll down and select Additional settings and then select Dynamic Search Ads setting. You should view the website domain and language listed if you previously gave this information. Ensure that the language in your settings matches the language of your website. If the domain or language is missing, enter the domain or select a language from the drop-down. Double-check to be sure that your domain name is spelled correctly.
- Select Save.
If your URL works only when it starts with 'www', enter the URL starting with 'www' in the campaign settings. Similarly, if your domain doesn't work if it starts with 'www', enter the domain in campaign settings without 'www'.
Issue #2: Your dynamic ad targets aren't set up correctly
Dynamic Search Ads use dynamic ad targets to determine which sections or pages of your website to use for showing your ads to customers.
How to fix
When you create a dynamic ad group, start by implementing 'Landing pages from your standard ad groups'.
If you want to set up your own dynamic ad targets, you'll need to format them in a way that our system understands.
- If your dynamic ad target isn’t serving, you may check its status indicating why the target is ineligible to serve. To understand the meaning of dynamic ad target statuses, learn more about targets for Dynamic Search Ads.
Issue #3: Your negative keywords and negative dynamic ad targets are blocking your ads from serving
Negative keywords
Negative keywords in your dynamic ad groups block your ads from appearing when a customer uses those words as a search phrase.
How to fix
Compare your negative keywords with pages on your website that you want to include for your Dynamic Search Ads. If there are matches, consider removing the negative keyword. For example, if you don’t want Dynamic Search Ads to show on a brand term that you’re already targeting with keywords, you should add this brand term as a negative exact match keyword.
Dynamic Search Ads may find opportunities to serve ads on searches that contain your brand term that you aren’t already targeting with keywords. To make sure that you don’t lose these serving opportunities, don’t add your brand term as a negative broad match keyword.
Negative dynamic ad targets
Negative dynamic ad targets prevent us from using certain pages on your website to target your Dynamic Search Ads. If someone uses a search phrase that could've been matched with a page from your website that's in a negative target, they won't view your ad.
How to fix
Check your negative targets and remove those that you don’t want:
- Sign in to your Search Ads 360 account.
- Select Campaigns from the left Page menu to ensure that you are on the 'All campaigns' page.
- From the Page menu, select the Audiences and content drop-down.
- Select Dynamic ad targets.
- Select Negative dynamic ad targets.
- Review your list of negative targets. Check if any of them are blocking pages on your website that you don't want blocked.
- Tick the box next to the negative target that's blocking those pages and select Remove.
Issue #4: Your targets don’t have coverage in the 'Website coverage' column
You can review the 'Website coverage' column in your client account to view the percentage of pages that belong to a dynamic ad target. This column will show you the percentage of landing pages that belong to the same category, contain certain words in the page title, use the same URL snippet or have common phrases in the content of the website itself, out of all the pages in your website's domain that Google has indexed. If you can’t view the 'Website coverage' column, add it to the table.
How to fix
Check the 'Website coverage' column in your client account to ensure that your target is set up correctly and targeting a subset of your web pages.
- It can take up to 72 hours to expose the website coverage of each dynamic ad target if you start a new dynamic ad group.
- Some sites may show '--', rather than a number, as the coverage means that there are no pages targeted at all, so this dynamic ad target will get no traffic. This column only shows the percent of webpages that are eligible to serve, so pages excluded by a negative dynamic ad target won’t be reflected in the value shown.
- Some sites may show 0.0% web page coverage and still have traffic because the site is very large.
- You can also use this column in the 'Negative dynamic ad targets' view to ensure that your negative targets don’t have a wider reach than you intend.
Example
If you add a 'Page_Content contains out of stock' target to prevent out of stock pages from serving, but 'out of stock' is in web page text across your website, then you may be accidentally preventing pages from your website from serving that you meant to target.
Note: Your Dynamic Search Ads can show instead of your keyword-based ad groups when the keywords in your keyword-based ad groups are active, paused or removed. Your Dynamic Search Ads targets may overlap with each other. If this is the case, the most targeted dynamic ad target may serve, or traffic may split between the targets so that you don’t get as much traffic as you would expect.
Frequently asked questions
In some cases, you might find that, instead of low traffic issues, your Dynamic Search Ads might not be serving or experiencing delays. You may experience delays in serving if you’ve updated your website, created a new campaign or edited your existing campaigns. Here are frequently asked questions with answers to help you understand the expected turnaround times:
How soon does the Dynamic Search Ads system reflect the changes I make to my website?
Website changes reflect as soon as the web index does, typically 7-10 days. If you use a Page feed, which has a different crawling mechanism (Ads bot instead of the organic Google bots), your pages get crawled more frequently.
New pages added to a page feed get crawled in a day and recrawled up to every 14 days. However, pages that get consistent clicks are crawled typically 2-3 days. If the feed is large, it can take up to 10 days to finish crawling the entire feed.
Are frequently updated websites eligible for Dynamic Search Ads?
How soon does the Dynamic Search Ads system start serving new campaigns?
A new campaign with a website domain that isn’t used in another active Dynamic Search Ads campaign may take 24–48 hours to start serving. If the new campaign is using a website domain that is already used in other active Dynamic Search Ads campaigns, then the new campaign may start serving within eight hours. In some cases, it may still take up to 48 hours.
How soon does the Dynamic Search Ads system reflect the changes that I make to my campaigns?
The following operations are instant:
- Bid changes
- Pausing a campaign, ad group or category URL
- New creatives for an existing ad group
- Changing the copy or tracking of an existing creative
Anything else, such as adding new URLs, moving URLs between ad groups or configuring new ad groups, can take up to 24 hours.
In order to confirm if your dynamic ad targets or ad target exclusions are valid, you can check your:
- Change history to know when the ad target exclusions were added
- Search terms report (STR) under 'Auto targets' tab to confirm serving date