Your Guide to Dynamic Keyword Insertion

An advanced feature that can help make your ad more relevant to a diverse audience is using “Dynamic Keyword Insertion”. Dynamic Keyword Insertion is sometimes referred to as the “dirty little secret” by PPC marketing agencies and the cornerstone of most internet marketing eBooks written by self proclaimed gurus. We need to fully understand Dynamic Keyword Insertion before implementing this feature in our campaigns and seeing it increase the ad’s click through rate as well as quality score.

This feature can be used with any text-based ads but should be used with care. Take your time to learn keyword insertion before implementing this technique to your account.

WHAT EXACTLY IS DYNAMIC KEYWORD INSERTION?

As we may or may not know, major PPC engines would show your keywords in bold letters in your ad as a reward for the relevancy of your PPC advertisement. Example: If you type keyword “Guitar sale” in the Google search bar, you will get results from Conrad-int.com. On the PPC ad, you will notice that the keywords searched by the user which triggered the ad are in bold, not only in the title, but the ad copy and the display URL as well. This will definitely pull a searcher’s eye, increase your click through rate (CTR), and also your quality score. This simply means that when your ad contains keywords that are bold, you are telling the user or the searcher you got the information they want to see or what they are looking for.

You may still be wondering where dynamic keyword insertion comes in here. It comes in when you have to use a lot of keywords for your ad. You could create individual ads for each keyword which will take a lot of your time, effort and of course money, or you could just write a single ad and let Google, Yahoo or MSN insert the keywords dynamically for you.

Allow me to give an example of what it is I’m referring to here: (we’ll take into account only a few keywords just for this purpose) Old Cars, Cheap Cars and Used Cars. Instead of writing individual ads for each keyword, we will just use some codes to let major search engines insert these keywords for us. In your ad group “Cars” you can create the following code: (Your ad group should also contain the keywords: Old Cars, Cheap Cars and Used Cars)

• Buy {KeyWord: Cars}
• We Sell {KeyWord: Cars}
• Free Maintenance for 1 Month
• brookcars.com/{KeyWord: Cars}

Depending on the keywords the users are searching, your ad will show up like the following:

Sample Query 1: Old Cars
Sample: Ad: Buy Old Cars

• We Sell Old Cars
• Free Maintenance for 1 Month
• Brookcars.com/OldCars

Sample Query 2: Cheap Cars
Sample Ad: Buy Cheap Cars

• We Sell Cheap Cars
• Free Maintenance for 1 Month
• Brookcars.com/CheapCars

As you can see when someone searches and types in the keyword for your ad group, your ad will show up in that manner except when a user searches for a variation of your keyword or a broad match of your keyword, you will see that the default text will show up. The default text is the text after the “{Keyword:” in your default ad. Remember your default text should still fit the maximum characters limit.

As you have noticed, keywords can be inserted dynamically into any part of your ad, including the destination URL. With this, searchers right away see what you are offering and will click on your ad seeing that it is relevant to what they’re looking for.

VARIATIONS AND CAPITALIZATIONS
There is a standard format in inserting keywords, this is {keyword: yourdefaulttext}. There are also variations to the standard format. In this case you can choose which letter of the keyword to capitalize.

These variations are as follows:

• keyword - old cars
• Keyword - Old cars
• KeyWord - Old Cars
• KEYword - OLD cars
• KEYWord - OLD Cars
• KeyWORD - Old CARS
• KEYWORD - OLD CARS

CONCLUSION
In conclusion, this feature is very helpful but one should be very careful when using this. There are several ways that you can manipulate this feature. An example would be getting the correct keywords for that specific ad group, meaning you should know what the similar and related keywords for your ads are. There are many ways for you to find out what these keywords are and the best way is by using a keyword research tool such as KeywordSpy whose feature includes giving information on similar and related keywords of your keyword of choice. Other helpful analytics such as ROI values are also provided by KeywordSpy which will help you filter out the best keywords for your advantage.

Now the challenge for you is to create a better, more dynamic ad. Just also bear in mind that all your ads should follow the search engine’s advertising policy.

Peter Zmijewski is the founder and CEO of KeywordSpy. You can find more information about him at PeterZmijewski.com