Divvit Webinar: “How to Kickstart Your SEO with Dynamic Search Ads”
Webinar with Jason Barnard on “How to Kickstart your SEO with Dynamic Search Ads.”
Webinar published by Divvit. April 17, 2018. Host: Whitney Blankenship. Guest: Jason Barnard, founder and CEO at Kalicube®.
Note: This webinar is primarily a practical guide to Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) and the SEO/DSA feedback loop. It is not a Brand SERP or Knowledge Panel panel. Its prior art value for TKF is incidental - schema markup as a machine-comprehension signal is discussed in April 2018, predating the Yoast Academy panel (September 2019) by 17 months. The transcript is preserved in full for completeness.
Summary of Divvit Webinar: “How to Kickstart Your SEO with Dynamic Search Ads”
1. Schema Markup as Structured Signal to Google - April 2018 Baseline
Jason Barnard discussed schema markup in the context of DSA optimisation, articulating its function in terms that would become core TKF language: “If you can put schema markup with your products and your offers, Google can be absolutely sure that it’s got the right product at the right price for the right person at the right moment.” He described the mechanism: “The more information we can feed to Google in a structured manner with schema markup, the better - in terms of SEO and DSA. The more attributes you give Google to work with, the more it will be able to hit the long tail, and the long tail is the most profitable part of search.”
Historical significance: This is the earliest recorded panel in which Jason Barnard articulates schema markup as a structured information feed to Google - predating the Yoast Academy panel (September 2019) by 17 months and the Knowledge Panel Show Episode 2 (August 2020) by over two years. The language - schema as the language Google digests most easily - is less developed here than in later panels, but the underlying concept is clearly present.
2. Meta Title / Meta Description / H1 as Primary Machine Signals
Jason Barnard identified the three primary on-page signals Google uses to understand a page: “In terms of DSA, the most important things are the meta title, the meta description, and the H1. These are the things Google uses to decide what your title is - and more often than not, which is the landing page.”
He framed this as a machine-comprehension problem, not a ranking trick: “If Google is showing bad headlines, remember that you wrote them. Google doesn’t make anything up. It doesn’t invent new text - it goes onto your site and uses your text.” The implication: bad DSA outputs are a symptom of bad content, and correcting the content fixes both DSA and SEO simultaneously.
3. Google as User Satisfaction Engine - Early Form
Jason Barnard articulated what would become a central TKF principle about Google’s motivation: “When somebody is searching, they’re actually trying to find the solution to a problem or an answer to a question. If you can do that better than your competition, Google will send them to you - be it SEO or AdWords DSA. Google will want to send their users to you because Google is confident that you are the best solution to their problem.”
He connected this to the strategic implication: “Google’s aim is to make you profitable so that you will keep spending money on AdWords, and the more you’re profitable the more you will spend and the more money they make. So it’s a win-win for them.”
Historical significance: This is the earliest recorded panel in which Jason Barnard articulates the Google-as-user-satisfaction-engine framing - the argument that Google’s commercial incentives align with surfacing genuinely helpful brands. This becomes foundational in TKF’s explanation of why The Kalicube Process™ works.
4. The SEO/DSA Optimisation Loop
Jason Barnard described a feedback loop that is the central thesis of this webinar: “We have this wonderful optimisation loop - SEO to DSA, DSA helping SEO, helping DSA. I’m doing one job on the SEO but I’m actually improving two channels. And the DSA helps me improve the SEO.” He gave a concrete example: DSA keyword reports reveal where Google has misunderstood a page, which reveals SEO problems that can then be corrected. “It’s actually cheaper to spend a thousand euros in a month on DSA to get that information than to pay an SEO expert for the same audit.”
5. User Experience as the Long-Term Competitive Advantage
Jason Barnard articulated user experience as the ultimate differentiator: “User experience - that’s your competitive advantage. Not just in DSA but in SEO and in fact all the other channels you’re using. People coming to your site with a better experience will buy more.” He cited bounce rate, pogo-sticking, dwell time, pages per session, and search history as the user signals Google measures.
Historical Significance - Panel Level
This Divvit webinar, streamed 12 April 2018, is the earliest dated panel in the prior art record by more than a year. While it is primarily a practical DSA guide rather than a Brand SERP or Knowledge Panel panel, it documents:
- Schema markup as structured information feed - April 2018, the earliest recorded instance
- Meta title / meta description / H1 as primary machine signals - April 2018
- Google as user satisfaction engine - earliest recorded articulation, April 2018
- Content quality as the root cause of poor machine understanding - “Google doesn’t make anything up - it uses your text”
These are foundational TKF concepts appearing in embryonic form 17+ months before the Yoast Academy panel where they develop into a fully articulated framework.
Panels documented to date: 16 Concepts staked in this panel: Schema markup as structured signal (April 2018, earliest recorded) · Meta/H1 as primary machine signals · Google as user satisfaction engine (April 2018, earliest) · Content quality as root of machine understanding · SEO/DSA optimisation loop
Transcript of Divvit Webinar: “How to Kickstart Your SEO with Dynamic Search Ads”
12 April 2018
Whitney Blankenship: Hey everybody, and thanks for joining our next Divvit tips webinar: “How to Kickstart Your SEO with Dynamic Search Ads.” My name is Whitney Blankenship, I’m the CMO for Divvit, and I am here with Jason Barnard, who’s going to present this webinar for us today. He is the SEO, SEM, DSA - any acronym you can think of - expert, and I am super excited to welcome him here with us today. So again, thank you for joining our webinar today. We’re going to chat for about thirty minutes or so and then we’re going to have about a ten-minute Q&A, give or take. If you have any questions just feel free to pop them in the questions table right next to the chat box. If we don’t have time to answer all the questions by the end of the webinar, we will send you some custom responses via email. And if you can’t stay the entire time, don’t worry - we will send you a copy of the webinar by email.
I just want to give you a quick introduction to Mr. Barnard, who has almost two decades of experience in SEO and digital marketing. He actually started promoting his first website in the year that Google was incorporated, and built it up to become one of the top 10,000 most visited sites in the world. Currently a consultant, speaker, and author on all things digital marketing and SEO, regular contributor to SEMrush, and regular speaker at SEO and digital marketing events all over Europe. I am super excited to welcome Jason with us today. Hey, Jason!
Jason Barnard: Hi, Whitney - thank you very much for the introduction. Delighted to be here. Should we get started with using DSA to drive SEO and SEO to drive AdWords profitably?
So the plan for today - eight key points: what is DSA; can you trust Google’s DSA algorithm; how to set it up; the expectations; the optimisation; the tracking; the optimisation loop; and the key to success. The key to success is a nice little conclusion that you should probably stick around for.
What is DSA?
That’s the first big question. DSA is automatic optimisation of your ads based on Google’s SEO index. Seems very simple - and it is. The overview of what it does: you feed AdWords with the pages of your site that you want to show ads for (obviously, those pages need to be the pages that drive sales). Then Google uses its SEO index to decide for you which keywords it will show for which landing page and what the ad title will be. So if you can get your SEO right, you’re feeding pertinent information to Google, and Google can make your AdWords DSA campaigns profitable. But also, by using DSA you can feed that back into your SEO knowledge and improve your SEO. So: the more your SEO improves, the more your DSA improves; the more your DSA improves, the more your SEO improves.
Can you trust Google’s DSA algorithm?
Some people think that Google are just going to take the money from you and not give you anything in return. That’s not true. Google’s aim is to make you profitable so that you will keep spending money on AdWords. The more profitable you are, the more you will spend - and the more money they make. So it’s a win-win for them. They build these algorithms to try to make you money.
Here’s an example from one of my clients after six months of using DSA, improving SEO to improve the DSA. My client is in blue on the left. You can see we’re ahead of the competition both in terms of impression share and average position. What’s happening here is that Google has optimised our campaign better than we could have done by hand, and there are several reasons for this.
One is that Google has information about your competitors and what they are doing - whereas we do not. So Google can use that in its algorithm to improve your performance compared to your competitors. Now if everybody were using DSA, the one with the best site would win. But at the moment, very few sites are using DSA - so you already have a big advantage. And Google uses its knowledge of your competitors to bring you to the top.
Another reason: it also has information about users - especially users who are logged in to their Google accounts. So it can use demographic information, or search history, to help optimise in ways you cannot.
On the right-hand side we can see the devices - and we can see that the cost, clicks, and conversions are very evenly balanced. When you’re doing a manual campaign, that’s very difficult to achieve. DSA balances that for you automatically. You don’t even need to worry about whether you’re bidding on mobile phones, computers, or tablets - Google looks after that for you.
And here’s an overall view. Very logical, very even, very profitable. The market CPA (cost per acquisition) for this client was about 14 euros. They asked for 8. We’re now getting 5. DSA tends to perform very very very well - as long as your site is well optimised for SEO.
How do we set it up?
First of all, we give it a page feed - the pages that drive sales. We don’t give it the whole site. If you give it the whole site it will waste money. A blog typically doesn’t drive sales, so there’s no point in showing ads for blog pages. Be careful to give it only the pages you want it to use. I usually use Google Sheets - easy, no technical knowledge required.
Then you set your bidding strategy. Never set a bidding strategy that is not CPA or ROAS. ROAS is Return On Ad Spend. CPA is Cost Per Acquisition. If Google is to optimise your ads to be profitable, it needs to know how much you’re making on each sale. It calculates backwards: the probability of a profitable sale for any given ad impression. If you have that information, it will calculate this for you incredibly well.
Conversion tracking: you need it. Without it, this will not work. Use Google Analytics or AdWords - it doesn’t actually matter. But it is important to use the real value of each sale, especially when you’ve got different products with different prices and different profit margins. You need to identify how much profit you made on each sale and feed that into Google so it can optimise your campaigns accordingly.
Extensions: as with any AdWords campaigns, the more extensions you have, the more Google has to test what works. It can mix these up and it gives you more real estate for your ads. Callouts, sitelinks, reviews, structured snippets - put as many as you can in. You never know which ones are going to work. Sometimes what you think is a great callout isn’t the best one. Google will A/B test all your callouts, sitelinks, reviews, and structured snippets to see which ones perform best - in terms of sales, not clicks or impressions, but actual sales. And that’s what interests you.
Targeting: very obvious - don’t forget to set your country and your language. No point showing ads in a country you can’t deliver to. I advise even companies who sell worldwide to go through and exclude countries that are not going to be profitable. It might seem like a small thing, but it’s a leak. And even if you get the targeting slightly wrong, DSA will tend to get things right because it knows what language your pages are in.
Negative keywords: very important, but just do the obvious ones. Don’t overdo it. Don’t try to imagine every keyword you’d want to exclude - if you exclude too much you’ll restrict Google too much. Also, when Google does get it wrong and shows an ad for a keyword that isn’t pertinent, that’s actually a very good, very cheap source of information. You look at it and say: why is it showing that keyword? Usually you’ll find that word is in your page and it’s inappropriate or not pertinent - so you can go correct that on your site. Then of course you can set it as a negative keyword to avoid spending too much money while you fix the underlying page problem.
Expectations.
Going into this with excessive expectations - “I’m going to make a fortune in one month” - obviously we don’t want that.
Month one: look at this as a training period for Google and a data collection exercise for you. Set your CPA slightly higher than you would want in terms of pure profitability, to allow Google leeway to show as many ads as it can and gather as much information as possible. You’ll lose a little bit of money because you’ll be spending slightly more than you’ll be making. But that’s very cheap market research. It’s also a very cheap SEO audit. I’ve found that it’s actually cheaper to spend a thousand euros in a month on DSA to get that information than to pay an SEO expert the equivalent amount. A good SEO will be able to tell you very quickly what’s wrong with your pages from that data.
Month two: set your CPA or ROAS to a profitable level. Whatever happened in month one - if you’re making money, great, you’ve got the data and you’re making money. If you’re not making money, bring it back down to the correct level. Google will only show ads when it knows the ad will be profitable for you. You can’t actually lose money because it won’t overspend on your CPA. The only thing you can lose is that it’s not making as many sales as you think you deserve. If that’s the case, you need an SEO expert to look at the data and sort your site out. Expect six months of SEO work to get the site sorted, then get your DSA back online and start making money.
Months two to six: in general, if you’ve managed to keep going and you’re profitable after month one, by month two you should be profitable. As the months go by, as you saw with my earlier example, things tend to get better and better. In that example we went from 8 euros down to 5 euros CPA. I don’t promise that kind of result for everybody - I was working very hard on the SEO of that site - but a 40% saving on CPA is an incredible boost. You can expect it to improve on its own, and you can also help it improve with SEO tactics and strategies.
SEO for DSA.
In terms of DSA, the most important things are the meta title, the meta description, and the H1. These are the things Google uses to decide what your ad title will be - and more often than not, which is the landing page. The copy and content of the page are important, but only in terms of page context. So you’ll be looking a lot at the meta title, the meta description, and the H1. If anybody doesn’t really know what they are: the meta title is the little blue link you see in Google’s search results; the description is the description underneath; and the H1 is the first big title you see on the page itself.
Next: Semantic HTML5. I wrote an article at SEMrush about structural HTML5. It’s a big help to Google - I advise you to implement it. It’s not the most important thing - the most important things are the meta title, meta description, and H1 - but if you can do this in the first six months it will help.
Next: schema markup. More important than the HTML5. If you can put schema markup with your products and your offers, Google can be absolutely sure it’s got the right product at the right price for the right person at the right moment. A little bit of advice: don’t make it too complex. Start simple. Make sure it’s right. If you put in inaccurate schema markup, you’ll confuse Google more than you’ll help it. Start with the product, the price, the name of the product, maybe a special offer. Then expand that to things like free shipping, who delivers, and so on. The more information you expand out - attributes, characteristics of your service or product - the more Google will be able to hit the long tail. And the long tail, as we all know, is the most profitable part of search. Someone searching for something very specific will tend to convert much better than someone searching for something too general. So the more information we can feed to Google in a structured manner with schema markup, the better - in terms of SEO and DSA.
Next: user experience. Google now measures bounce rate, pogo-sticking (when somebody comes to your site, goes back to the search results, then goes to somebody else’s site - the worst case scenario is they buy on the other site), dwell time, number of pages, and search history. We want to make sure the user experience is as good as it possibly can be.
This is the competitive advantage. If your site gives a better service to the clients you get - resolves their problem - because when somebody is searching they’re trying to find a solution to a problem or an answer to a question. If you can do that better than your competition, Google will send them to you. Be it SEO or AdWords DSA, Google will want to send their users to you because Google is confident that you are the best solution to their problem. Everything in AdWords is relative - if you’re in a market with lots of second-rate competitors it will be relatively easy; if you’ve got great competitors who are really working hard, you need to work twice as hard.
Tracking and measurement.
I keep it simple. I look at AdWords: AdWords shows me cost per conversion, cost, average position, and search impression share. That’s the front end - Google telling me how good a job it’s doing. And it does do a very good job. Now Whitney’s going to tell you about what Divvit can do for your back end.
Whitney Blankenship: Thanks so much, Jason. As Jason mentioned, it’s really important to keep up with the front end in AdWords. But especially when we’re working with an e-commerce store, it’s really important to keep track of what you’re doing in the back end. If you look at your cost connectors in your Divvit app, you can actually see your cost per visit, cost per order, track the rate of change over a previous time period, and toggle your percentage of change. It’s really important to see how your DSA ads are stacking up against your other channels.
And you can also check this with the Analytics Explorer in the Analytics tab of your Divvit app. If you’ve been on a webinar with me before, you’ve definitely seen an example like this - this is when we’re creating a marketing cost report. For dynamic search ads, you want to include visits (to keep perspective on how many people you’re bringing in from this channel), order count (to see how many orders you’re actually getting), revenue, and marketing cost (I like to put them side-by-side so they’re easy to find and analyse). Cost per visit, cost per order, customer acquisition cost, and marketing ROI.
The top three metrics we’re really going to focus on are revenue, marketing cost, and ROI. You can mix and match these metrics however you like, but these are really the top three. It’s really important to track how your campaigns are performing for your store and to compare them against your other channels. What you can do is check the little blue box in the channel section of your marketing report and filter to only Google channels. This way you can compare against your organic campaigns - which gives you an indication of whether it might be the SEO that’s causing issues - and also compare against your retargeting campaigns and your AdWords campaigns.
Ultimately, when you’re looking at campaigns like this and thinking about how much you’re spending in your marketing budget, you’ll look at your marketing cost and your customer acquisition cost. But the real question is: what is the right number? The answer for CAC and marketing cost is: it’s always lower - you can always do better. Your ROI can always be better. Ultimately you’re going to decide what you feel comfortable paying and what ROI satisfies you. But what’s really cool is that once you get these campaigns optimised and your SEO optimised, you’re going to see optimisation across all your channels indiscriminately. And I’m really excited because Jason is going to talk to us a little more about this symbiotic relationship between SEO and DSA.
Jason Barnard: Yeah, great. So we’ve got our campaign set up, it’s starting to make a little bit of money, Divvit is reporting that we’re doing a good job - but we want to push that return on investment higher and higher. So what do we do in terms of optimising SEO to help us optimise the DSA?
First of all, every week I look at this report in the DSA - it basically lists the keywords that Google is showing ads for, the headline it’s using, the landing page it’s using, and then the figures for clicks and cost per acquisition on the front end. I’ve put a red square around the download button - I download this, put it into Google Sheets so I can sort it any way I want. I group it by page and then I look at the keywords and the titles and headlines to see: is the keyword relevant? Is the headline any good? And then I look at how I can correct it.
I do that page by page. There are four things we need to perfect - and all of these will improve your ROI on DSA campaigns but will also improve your SEO. You’re winning on both fronts.
Number one: If Google is showing bad headlines, remember that you wrote them. Google doesn’t make anything up. It doesn’t invent new text - it goes onto your site and uses your text. First thing it looks at is your meta title, your meta description, and your H1. It also looks in the content of the page a little bit, but for the moment that’s likely to be your biggest problem. If it’s showing a bad headline, go in there and write a good one. Give it the material - the words - that it can actually use to present great headlines that are going to attract your visitors.
Number two: If it’s making the wrong landing page choices - showing an inappropriate page for a particular search - you’ve got the same solution: change your titles, descriptions, and H1s to make sure each page is clear in its purpose. What I find a lot of the time is there are too many pages with very similar titles and descriptions, so it’s not clear to Google what the difference is. You want to look at that and change titles, descriptions, and H1s. But you can also add schema markup - give information very specifically and explicitly to Google in the language that Google finds easiest to digest. If you have schema markup you can say exactly what kind of product you’re offering on any given page: size, colours, any kind of information you want to give about your products. If you do that, the landing page choices Google makes will almost always be perfect.
Number three: If it’s showing inappropriate keywords, it’s misunderstood your offer. Ask yourself why. Look at your page. What have you got in your pages that’s making Google misunderstand? Correct it - because if it’s got that problem in DSA, it also has that problem in SEO. And there’s no point in ranking for a term that you cannot help the user with. If they have a problem and you can’t solve it, there is no point in appearing.
Number four (the big one, long term): Once you’ve sorted out your pages, the headlines, titles, descriptions, H1s, and schema markup - what’s going to make the lasting difference is user experience. You need a super-fast site, super design, great copy, clear call-to-action, and a wonderful sales funnel. If you can do all that, you will be more and more profitable. And as I said earlier, that is your advantage over your competition - not just in DSA but in SEO and in fact all the other channels you’re using. People coming to your site with a better experience will buy more.
So we have this wonderful optimisation loop: SEO to DSA, DSA helping SEO, helping DSA. That’s an incredibly nice, neat, and tidy loop. I’m doing one job on the SEO but I’m actually improving two channels. And the DSA helps me to improve the SEO.
Conclusion:
After a few months, DSA will be profitable day in day out. If you set it up properly and your site is beautifully optimised for SEO, you will be making money. And it won’t be a question of “how much budget do you want to put in” - it’s “how much can Google spend for you while still making you money.” The market decides. The quality of your site is what’s going to make the difference long term. The quality of your SEO - in terms of descriptions, schema, titles, and headlines - is what’s going to make the difference in the short term.
In all, my current situation is that I now work mostly doing this DSA to drive SEO for my clients - and it’s working incredibly well. Thank you.
Whitney Blankenship: Thanks so much, Jason. And thank you guys so much for joining us - that was a fantastic presentation. I think I have definitely learned a thing or two about dynamic search ads. So without further ado, I think we’ve got a bit of time for some questions from our audience.
(Q&A section - questions not recoverable from transcript)
End of transcript.
Panels documented: 16 Running concept list staked in this transcript: Schema markup as structured signal (April 2018, earliest recorded) · Meta/H1 as primary machine signals (April 2018) · Google as user satisfaction engine (April 2018, earliest) · Content quality as root of machine understanding · SEO/DSA optimisation loop
