When it comes to online ads, relevancy is king. The closer your ad copy matches the searcher’s intent, the more likely you are to get their click. One of the ways that advertisers can increase their relevancy is through dynamic keyword insertion. When writing typical ad copy, an advertiser will write a single title and description for their ad. For example:
Buy Candy Online
Satisfy your sweet tooth with a bulk
order! Volume discounts available!
This gets the message across, but misses out on an opportunity to be more relevant for customers. With dynamic keyword insertion, you can substitute a word or phrase in your ad with a keyword from your ad group. For example, if you’re advertising with the keywords “lollipops”, “gumdrops”, and “chocolate”, you could change your title to this:
Buy {KeyWord:Candy} Online
When you see it in your account, it looks a bit ugly. But when someone searches for “lollipops”, they’ll get this:
Buy Lollipops Online
Satisfy your sweet tooth with a bulk
order! Volume discounts available!
The ad will now be more relevant, and you’ll have the visual advantage of having a bold word in your ad title. But what about the word “Candy” that follows the colon in the ad copy? That’s there to make sure you have a placeholder if your ad copy runs too long. If one of your keywords was “red rope licorice”, trying to put it in the title would exceed Google’s character limits. When that happens, the ad simply substitutes the generic word “Candy”.
This all sounds very friendly, but if you’re not careful you can turn your own ads against you. You can keep it from becoming your foe by following a few simple rules.
Organize your Ad Groups
This is good advice generally, but especially so when you’re talking about dynamic keyword insertion. Take the time to make sure that every keyword in the ad group makes grammatical sense when inserted into your headline. Separate nouns and verbs into their own ad groups, and watch out for phrases. What would happen to the example ad if one of our keywords was “buy candy”?
Buy Buy Candy Online
Repetition can be a useful tool in advertising, but that just looks like bad editing.
Another tactic many advertisers use to boost relevance is bidding on misspelled keywords. It’s especially important that you quarantine those keywords into their own ad groups to avoid having them show up in your dynamic ad text.
Capitalize
Capitalization makes sense in ad headlines, but might not in your ad description. Luckily, both AdWords and AdCenter use the same methods to help you use proper capitalization in your text. Here’s how your ad title would appear using their methods with the keyword “sugar free gum”:
Buy {keyword:Candy} Online
Buy sugar free gum Online
Buy {KeyWord:Candy} Online
Buy Sugar Free Gum Online
Buy {Keyword:Candy} Online
Buy Sugar free gum Online
Buy {KEYWord:Candy} Online
Buy SUGAR Free Gum Online
Buy {KeyWORD:Candy} Online
Buy Sugar FREE GUM Online
Buy {KEYWORD:Candy} Online
Buy Sugar Free Gum Online
As you can see, different forms of capitalization can make a big difference in the appearance of the ad text.
