
With all the recent advances in targeting offered in Google AdWords, I thought it made sense to take a deeper look at one of the AdWords features that has almost become old hat to PPC marketers at this point. Dynamic Keyword Insertion is a tool that is often overlooked in the sea of new features and betas that Google continues to churn out, but this staple feature can make a drastic and immediate improvement to your paid search account performance.
Google defines Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) as “an advanced AdWords feature that dynamically updates your ad text to include one of your keywords that matches a customer’s search terms.” PPC marketers know it as putting those funny little brackets and the word “KeyWord” into the ad copy so that the search term will show up within the body of the ad.
For example, if I use the headline: “Buy {Keyword:New Sneakers}” in an ad and someone searches a keyword I am bidding on, that specific search term (“blue sneakers” or “men’s sneakers” etc.) could appear in the headline of the ad. If the term is too long for the character limit, my default phrase “New Sneakers” will appear instead.
As I said before, DKI is so ingrained in the mindset of most digital marketers that it’s easy to lose sight of how important it can be for increasing click-through-rate, traffic, and conversions. A recent experience with a client who was dead set against DKI showed me what a valuable tool it is and the impact it can have.
My client was convinced that dynamic keyword insertion was bringing in illegitimate traffic and, despite my protests, insisted that its use was responsible for lead conversions that were unrelated to their business. Rather than upset the client, I did a little experiment and paused all the ads that used any instance of dynamic keyword insertion.
As soon as I paused these ads, I noticed a dramatic drop in account performance.
In the 20 days that we did not employ DKI:
The logic is fairly simple: conversions dropped because a vital step of the conversion process has been removed. If you aren’t getting clicks to the site, how can you generate conversions? Dynamic keyword insertion is known to increase clicks because it forces your ad to reflect back to the user exactly what they are looking for, word for word.
With this evidence I was able to convince my client to revert back to the previous ad copy, using DKI, and make a few other adjustments to improve lead quality. In the 20 days after we reverted to the previous copy, the results were equally astounding:
After seeing such beneficial results, I then began to look at some of my other accounts and find creative ways to expand use of DKI. So far, the results have been positive.
Some quick notes on making the most of DKI:
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.