What is Dynamic Keyword Insertion?
Dynamic keyword insertion is a facility offered by Google’s AdWords system that lets you automatically include keywords used by a searcher in your AdWords ad copy.
There are three reasons why dynamic keyword insertion is useful.
- Any keywords in your ad copy will be shown in bold in your ad. This increases your click through rate because your ad attracts more attention.
- It lets you tailor your ad copy to the precise keywords that your searcher are using. If someone is looking for health insurance uk then using that phrase in your ad will make it as relevant as it can be to the searcher.
- Dynamic keyword insertion can be a great time saver. If you are building a big keyword list but don’t have the time or systems in place to create ads for each keyword then dynamic keyword insertion can do the job for you.
Format for Dynamic Keyword Insertion with AdWords
The format you need to use is as follows.
{KeyWord:default copy}
In the above the default copy is used if the searcher uses a keyword that is too long to fit in the ad. With AdWords you have just 25 characters in the headline so if you have set up a keyword that is 26 or more characters long, dynamic keyword insertion will fail. In such a case Google will use your default copy instead.
You can use dynamic keyword insertion more than once in an ad and of course if you do so on the second or third line of your ad the keyword can be up to 35 characters long instead because there is more room available.
There are a three other points worth noting about dynamic keyword insertion.
- You can use it in your actual URL to feed info to your server about which keyword generated the traffic. In this case you would just place a query string at the end of your URL as in domain.com?keyword={keyword}. Doing this will pass the keyword to your server and you can use this info if you want to display the keyword on the web page too.
- If you use dynamic keyword insertion in ads that are to be included in the AsSense network thennit is your default copy that is displayed.
- You need to be careful with dynamic keyword insertion if you are using strange keywords such ad domain names or competitors’ names because these may end up appearing on your ads.
Dynamic keyword insertion formats
There are 6 different formats used in setting up dynamic keyword insertion.
- keyword – this will display your keyword in the ad in lower case
- Keyword – this will display your keyword in the ad with the first letter capitalised
- KeyWord – this will display your keyword in the ad with all first letters capitalised
- KEYWord – this will capitalise the first word and capitalise the first letter of subsequent words
- KeyWORD – this will capitalise the first letter of the first word and put all subsequent words in capitals but you need to comply with Google’s policy on excessive capitalisation
- KEYWORD – this will display your keyword all in capitals but you need to comply with Google’s policy on excessive capitalisation