If you read this blog regularly, you've been repeatedly encouraged to take advantage of dynamic keyword insertion (DKI), a method of including a variable text segment in your ad copy, into which the keyword that the user searched for is dynamically inserted into your ad. The resulting rendered ad copy that is uniquely relevant to the user. DKI is a good idea for ads that appear on search results pages triggered by a specific keyword.
However, not all CPC ads appear on search results pages:
- Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft content match ads are not specific to a single keyword -- they are triggered based off the full set of keywords in your ad group -- and so dynamic keyword insertion does not apply on the content network (your default text is used instead).
- Non-search engine CPC networks like Facebook, MySpace, AdBrite, and many others do not even offer DKI.
And not all search ad groups can comfortably handle dynamic insertion of ad text:
- When the most important keywords in your ad group are very different in length, it doesn't make sense to write a single ad that dynamically alternates between them. Imagine trying to write an ad with a DKI slot to accommodate either "SEM" (3 characters) or "Search Engine Marketing" (23), or an ad to slot to alternate between "ads" (3) or "advertisements" (14). Clearly, these short keywords require one ad, and the long keywords require another.
- If your important keywords contain acronyms or other all-caps words, search engines will not dynamically insert them as acronyms. Dynamic keyword insertion supports only proper case (e.g., "Sem"), lowercase (e.g., "sem"), but not all caps or acronyms (e.g. "SEM"). If you want your acronyms to display as all caps, you can't dynamically insert them.
In situations where dynamic keyword insertion is not possible, practical, or ideal, it is still possible to achieve the same level of super-relevance of the ad copy to the user. It just requires a bit more work. With dynamic keyword insertion, you create one ad group with one dynamic ad and n different keywords, which get dynamically inserted into the ad (so the ad is written one time, but has n different surface forms). But with "static keyword insertion", you create n different ad groups with one ad each, and only one keyword. This is obviously more labor intensive, but the result is at least the same, and most likely much better. There are still n different surface forms of ads -- you just need to create them all individually.
Now, let's look at a couple of examples of static keyword insertion in action.
Perhaps you've recently noticed an ad like these on Facebook:
If you click on one of the ads, it will become quite apparent that the offer is not actually specific to your age or location. However, these ads are more eye-catching than non-demographically-specific ones, because they at least appear more relevant to the user. How did the advertiser create these ads? Facebook does not allow "dynamic demographic data insertion" for age, gender, or location. Instead, these advertisers probably created ads for each possible user segment, and matched the ad copy to the ad targeting (probably a few dozen separate ads).
A different issue is faced by companies advertising products and services with acronyms for names, which have both a long form and a short acronym form in common usage. Consider a company advertising on the keywords "SEM software" and "search engine marketing software". In theory, similar ad copy would be applicable to these two keywords, but a single ad structure would not be practical for incorporating these keywords interchangeably. For one thing, "search engine marketing software" is over 25 characters, and cannot fit into the ad headline, so default text would appear if you attempted to dynamically insert this keyword. Writing a custom ad for this keyword would enable you to fit the word "software" somewhere else in the ad, other than the headline. Secondly, the "SEM software" keyword would render into the headline as Sem Software or sem software -- SEM Software would not be an option. Writing a custom, non-dynamic ad would allow you to incorporate the correct acronym into the ad with the correct capitalization. Furthermore, because the phrase "SEM Software" is so few characters compared to "search engine marketing software", there would be plenty of extra room in the "SEM Software" ad for more descriptive and promotional text. In the example below, these two high quality, super-relevant ad creatives could not possibly be derived from dynamic keyword insertion.
Dynamic keyword insertion is a time-saving device that keeps you from having to rewrite your ad many times in order to make it specifically relevant to many keywords. However, it is not always available, and even when it is, it is not always the best solution. The key principle behind the use of DKI is to present the user with the best-targeted, most compelling possible ad. Sometimes DKI is not the right choice for technical reasons, but the basic principle remains valuable, and sometimes this principle can be satisfied by manually inserting the keyword into different versions of the same ad. Do use DKI as a time saver when it makes sense to do so, but do not be bound by it. Never give up on the pursuit of high relevance and keyword-rich ad copy just because DKI is unavailable.