The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

The fundamental task of marketing and sales is to convince people that they want your product. Usually, this is a two part process:

1. Figure out what exactly people want.
2. Show them that your product or service meets those needs.

The first part of this -- figuring out precisely what people want -- can be challenging in traditional marketing campaigns.  However, in paid search marketing marketers have the great advantage of knowing exactly and explicitly what our potential customers want: they tell us by searching for exactly that thing.  And, because we have the technology to serve different ads to people based on what they searched for, we have the potential to show people ads that explicitly tell that whatever it is they searched for is exactly what we are offering.  When we do this effectively, we get higher click-through rates and more customers visiting our sites via paid search.

On a search results page, the best way to show users that we have what they're looking for is to insert their keywords into our ads.  If someone searches for neck pain relief, they want to see advertisers who offer neck pain relief.  This seems obvious, but look at the results I get for this query:

All three of these advertisers do in fact offer products that treat neck pain.  However, none of them has a very compelling ad, because none of their ads actually say "neck pain relief".  In contrast, below are sponsored search results for search marketing software and vintage air jordans.  In each of these cases, an advertiser has placed the keyword that I searched for into their ad, which makes their ads much more compelling.  in the second case, eBay has actually included my keyword in both their headline and the first line of the ad description.  Their ad stands out as being most relevant to my search.

So what do I have to do to get keywords into my ads? One way to achieve this is to write a different ad for every keyword in your account.  This would obviously be very tedious, especially if you have hundreds or thousands of keywords.  Fortunately, a more elegant option is available: dynamic keyword insertion allows advertisers to insert keywords used in search queries directly into any ad. However, the technology is often misunderstood and under-utilized, especially by novice search marketers.

How to Do Dynamic Keyword Insertion

To insert a keyword into your ad, you can use the keyword variable {KeyWord} anywhere within your ad text.  For example, if I were advertising various types of candies, I might have the following keywords and the following ad:

• rock candy
• chocolate candy
• gummy bears
• cherry cordials
• chocolate covered gummy bears

Headline: {KeyWord}
Description Line 1: Delicious {KeyWord}
Descritpion Line 2: Made by hand since 1963.
Display URL: www.LittleSusiesCandies.com

This ad would appear differently depending on what people searched for.  So, if someone searched for chocolate candy, the ad would like like this:



But if someone searched for cherry cordials, the same ad would look like this:



Thus, I would only need to write one single ad to serve extremely specific ads for each of those keywords.

Default Text

Unfortunately, it's not quite so simple. It is possible that the search engine will be unable to dynamically insert your keyword into the ad, as you request.  This happens when you have a long keyword that makes the ad run too long, or when your ad appears on the content network (in which case there is no keyword).  In order to handle these possibilities, it is necessary to specify default text that can appear instead of the keyword.  This situation would arise if I used the ad above and someone searched for chocolate covered gummy bears.  That phrase is 29 characters long, which means it can't fit in the ad headline, and delicious chocolate covered gummy bears is 39 characters long, which means it can't fit in the description line 1.  So, the ad copy I proposed above is not adequate.  I need to specify a default text to show when my keyword is too long.  For this, it's usually good to use something general that is applicable to any of your keywords.  In this case, "gourmet candy" might be a good option.  The syntax for keyword defaults is to place a colon (:) after the word "keyword", and then the default text.  So, now my ad would look like:

Headline: {KeyWord:Gourmet Candy}
Description Line 1: Delicious {KeyWord:Gourmet Candy}
Descritpion Line 2: Made by hand since 1963.
Display URL: www.LittleSusiesCandies.com

This ad will still include the keyword when it is short enough, but it will display the default text when the keyword is too long.

Common Mistakes with Keyword Insertion

The advantages of keywords insertion are obvious: your ad tells users that you have exactly what they're looking for, and that's exactly what they wanted to see.  However, there are some common mistakes, which can be prevented by previewing you keyword-inserted ads for all of the keywords in your ad groups.

The first issue is capitalization. Preview your ads to make sure they have the capitalization you want when they actually display.  Search engines will apply the capitalization of your default text to whatever text you put in there.  This is most often a problem with acronyms or other words that have unusual capitalization.

The second issue is much more serious.  If you create a dynamic keyword insertion ad in an ad group with 100 keywords, you have effectively just written 100 different ads.  Some of these may not coming out looking exactly as you intended. Suppose the candy advertiser discussed above were to include the keyword shop for candy in their campaign.  They would not want it to be the same ad group with dynamic keyword insertion, or they would risk serving up the awkward ad copy "Delicious Shop for Candy" in description line 1.  Below is a funny examples of an advertiser who used dynamic keyword insertion but didn't consider all of the different keywords in their ad groups:

Keyword: dangerous drugs



So, if you are giong to use dynamic keyword insertion -- and you probably should -- be sure you consider how your ad will look for EVERY keyword in your ad group!

With a little bit of care and knowledge, you can apply this very powerful tool to your campaigns and give searchers exactly what they're looking for: you.

Ehren, Clickable SEM Guru
 
Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

A few weeks back, we discussed strategies for bidding on your brand name . As we said then, every search

As many search marketers know, an important rule of thumb is to include campaign keywords in your ad