Thursday, February 12, 2009

Adwords Keyword Insertion

While preparing for the Google Challenge last week I started wondering how come so many companies manage to have tailor-made ads for each individual keyword you type in. I bet there are some complex tools out there to automate the process, but for the common guys like us Dynamic Keyword Insertion is actually an easy way to do it.

Here is how it works. Say you're selling phone chargers. Instead of having an ad showing "Great Phone Chargers" you would be better off showing "Great  Motorola Chargers" when people search for Motorola, or "Great Nokia Chargers" when people search for "Nokia" and so on. But if you were to create a single Ad Group for each different keyword/ad combination you could go nuts! 

That's where Keyword Insertion plays a role. Here is how your Ad should look like at AdWords:

Great {KeyWord:Phone Chargers}
Selection of {Keyword:Phone Chargers}
in stock. Free shipping!
www.example.com
http://www.example.com/?kw={keyword:nil}


Then you should set up your keywords as "Motorola Chargers", "Nokia Chargers" and any other brand of charger you wish. 
If someone searches for "LG Chargers" Google will automatically make your Ad look like this:

Great LG Chargers
Selection of
LG Chargers
in stock. Free shipping!
www.example.com
http://www.example.com/?kw=lg%20chargers

This is quite a good way of saving work and producing more effective Ads. You can find a detailed tutorial at Google AdWords Help.

I guess the trick behind it is how to manage the "dynamic" ads relevance. The best way of dealing with it is by preparing landing pages that will react to the keywords chosen (as suggested by the URL in the example above, where the keyword is passed along to the landing page as a query). 

Anyhow, I will go ahead and convince my group to start using it! Will you?