Using Dynamic Keyword Insertion in PPC Campaigns

Dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) can help you increase your visibility, relevancy, click-through rates and eventually your quality score. It is very easy to use from a technical perspective, but much trickier to understand the ins and outs. Here’s how to use DKI:

Basics of Dynamic Keyword Insertion

To use DKI, you basically put the word Keyword: in brackets, followed by a phrase that will be used if the search phrase that was entered was too long. For example:

Find {Keyword:Car Washes in CA}

If someone enters a keyword such as “Car wash San Mateo,” they would instead see “Find car wash San Mateo.” However, if theyentered “Find a car wash in San Fernando open at 12:00 am” all they would see is “Find Car Washes in CA.”

Maximizing the Effectiveness of Keyword Insertion

There are a couple main benefits to using DKI. First, people see that the text in your ads is bold, which is because anytime your text is the same as what they entered, it is bolded by Google. Since you are dynamically inserting the exact text they entered, you are virtually guaranteed of showing up bolded. Once you are bolded, you are often more likely to get clicks. With a higher click-through rate, Google will reward you with a higher Quality Score, which will respectively lower your bids and possibly increase your position.

Remember to always check out your competition when you are using DKI. If nobody else is using it, it can be an incredibly effective strategy. However, in some markets, almost every other ad is using DKI. You might enter a keyword and see four other ads with the exact same headline: the keyword you just entered. In that situation, you should probably try writing your own unique headline that will stand out, and instead use DKI just in the body text.

Track the Actual Keywords

Don’t treat DKI as a static process. Instead, monitor your keywords to figure out what people are entering to land on your website. Then, using that data, further refine your keyword bids and your ads. For example, in the beginning of a campaign you might be bidding on phrase match “get a date”. You use a dynamic headline for your ad and run the campaign for a couple weeks.

After a couple weeks, you find that you are getting a lot of traffic on “get a date tonight.” You enter “get a date tonight” and find that your ad shows up with the DKI headline, but so do three other ads. Now you know what is getting traffic. So pull that keyword out of the ad group, write a unique and compelling ad for just that keyword, and re-launch the keyword. Your click-through rate will likely skyrocket.

Using DKI is an easy and often effective strategy. Remember to always test other strategies and headlines along with DKI headlines, as its effectiveness can go down if a lot of other ads are also using it.

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Author: jm

Joan Mullally has been doing business online for more than 20 years and is a pioneer in the fields of online publishing, marketing, and ecommerce. She is the author of more than 200 guides and courses designed to help beginner and intermediate marketers make the most of the opportunities the Internet offers for running a successful business. A student and later teacher trainee of Frank McCourt’s, she has always appreciated the power of the word, and has used her knowledge for successful SEO and PPC campaigns, and powerful marketing copy. One computer science class at NYU was enough to spark her fascination with all things digital. In her spare time, she works with adult literacy, animal fostering and rescue, and teaching computer skills to women.