On most major Pay Per Click platforms, there is a little known feature called “Dynamic Keyword Insertion”. Dynamic Keyword Insertion is one of those “dirty little secrets” used by PPC marketing agencies and is the cornerstone of the millions of Internet marketing eBooks written by self proclaimed “gurus”. Dynamic Keyword Insertion needs to be fully understood before it can become marginally effective and when it is, it can increase your ads click through rate (And subsequently quality score) massively.
This guide will show you how to correctly implement the Dynamic Keyword Insertion feature into your ads on the three major PPC advertising networks (Google, Yahoo and MSN). As always, test and understand before fully committing to any permanent changes.
So What Exactly Is Dynamic Keyword Insertion?
As you may or may not know, all the major PPC search engines reward the relevancy of your PPC advertisement by showing keywords in bold in your ad. For example, below you can see an Google Ads ad for RedFly Marketing. The keyword we are targeting is “PPC Management”.
As you can see the keywords we targeted and that triggered our ad were in BOLD in the ad. You can see that not only is the keyphrase “PPC Management” in the title of the ad bold, but the keyword in the ad copy and the display URL is also bold. This has been proven time and time again to increase your ads CTR. It makes your ad stand out more and “pull” a searchers eyes to it. We also know from my previous article on Adwords Quality Score that an increase in CTR will increase your quality score, bid rank and lower your minimum bid.
When your ads contain your keywords bolded, you are also showing an ad that a searcher explicitly wants to see. It appears super relevant and exactly what they are looking for.
So where does Dynamic Keyword Insertion come into play? What happens if you have a LOT of keywords? You COULD write individual ads for each one. Spending hours, days even weeks writing a different ad for each keyword. Or you could have Google/Yahoo/MSN insert the keywords that you want bolded dynamically.
Let me show you an example. Let’s take the following keyword list in a single ad group: (we’ll keep it small for the purpose of this demonstration)
Chocolate Bars
Stinger Bars
Lollypops
Brown Bread
As you can see, the above list of keywords are all somewhat related. Rather than splitting up all the keywords into smaller adgroups, you can write a SINGLE AD for them all and have the search engine place your keywords into your ad! Here is how the ad should be created:
Once you set this ad live, the search engine will automatically replace {KeyWord:Online Newsagents} in the ad with whatever keyword from your list that was searched for. Using the above list of search terms, The ads will look like this:
What happens when someone searches for a variation of my keyword that does not match exactly?
If you broad matched your keywords and someone searched for “Stinger Bars and Lollypops”, your ad would still show, however it would show the DEFAULT ad as shown below.
The default text is the text after the “{KeyWord:” part. In this example, it was “Online Newsagents”. Your default text should still fit the maximum characters limit.
TIP: The ad title can expand past the 25 character limit and Google Ads will accept it as long as the default text remains at 25 characters or less
You will notice that keywords can be dynamically inserted into ANY section of your ad, including your destination URL. This shows your keyword more times in your ad and is eye catching in so far as the keywords are bolded multiple times and appears more relevant to the user/searcher increasing your CTR and ultimately (hopefully) your conversions.
What About Quality Score?
We have already gone over how having keywords in your ad title and ad text can improve Google Ads quality score, unfortunately, Dynamic Keyword Insertion does not improve your quality score directly, however it can indirectly help your quality score by increasing your keywords CTR.
Variations And Capitalization.
The standard format for dynamically inserting your keyword is this: {keyword:yourdefaulttext}
There are also variations you can use to capitalize your dynamically inserted keyword as follows:
- keyword – No capitalization, all word(s) are in lower case
- Keyword – The first word is capitalized
- KeyWord – Every word is capitalized
- KEYword – Every letter in first word is capitalized
- KEYWord -Every letter in the first word AND the first letter of the second
- KEYWORD – Every letter is capitalized
Yahoo And AdCenter.
Yahoo and MSN both allow Dynamic Keyword Insertion however unlike with Google Ads, with them it is a “known feature”. There are options to dynamically insert keywords at the ad creation level. Yahoo even go so far as to say the Dynamic Keyword Insertion will increase the ads quality index (YSM quality score).
Be Careful!
Dynamic Keyword Insertion is only valuable when closely managed and monitored. Ebay are notorious for running MASSIVE PPC campaigns with Google Ads using Dynamic Keyword Insertion and making themselves look incredibly stupid. The bid on literally millions of dictionary words and combinations and end up with ridiculously structured irrelevant ads. Below you will find a small example.
In Conclusion.
So there you have it. Although Google Ads has very little documentation on this feature and some in the industry regard it as a close kept secret, you are now armed with a very powerful tool. We have seen CTR increases from 1% to 20% using this method alone. Be careful, use it wisely and where possible, insert the words manually into your ads. This is a time saver, not a substitute for human common sense.