Up Your Relevance With Keyword Insertion

Relevance is one of the most important elements of AdWords success. The more relevant your ad is for a search, the more likely the searcher is to click on your ad, rather than someone else's ad. And the way Google calculates ad pricing, all other things being equal, the more relevant an ad is, the lower the cost per click for that ad.

So increasing the relevance of your ads is clearly a secret of AdWords success. And learning about Keyword Insertion is one of the secrets of creating high-relevance ads. If you want to massacre your competition on Google, you need to know about this.

Ads that contain the keyword someone is searching for are more relevant to searchers. That makes sense. If you're searching for a Ford Model T, which of these ad headlines would be more relevant to you: "Old Cars For Sale" or "Ford Model T For Sale." Clearly, the second headline is more relevant. And to make things even better, when a search term appears in an ad, Google bolds the words of the search, making it stand out even more. So including keywords in your ad headlines and body text is a great way to increase the relevance and overall performance of your ads.

But there's a problem. You can easily create unique ads when you only have a few keywords to worry about. But what happens when you are advertising on hundreds, even thousands of keywords? Creating custom ads for each keyword by hand would be incredibly tedious & time consuming. This is where Keyword Insertion comes into play.

Instead of manually creating an ad for every keyword, you can create generic ads, and use Keyword Insertion to automatically insert the keywords from the current search into your ad. When done right, a generic ad using Keyword Insertion looks like an ad custom-made for their search term. It allows you to have the relevance of a hand-crafted ad, without the mind-numbing labor of creating thousands of ads by hand.

Now Keyword Insertion is an advanced technique. It's part art and part science. There's no way I can teach you everything you need to know about it in this one article. However, I can get you pointed in the right direction. Here's an example based on our earlier headlines that will make the basic process clearer:

Say you are selling old cars. You might create an AdWords ad that looked like this:

Old Cars For Sale
We have a variety of Old Cars
for Sale. Best deals in town!

Say the actual cars you have for sale are a Ford Model T and an Edsel. You could run the ad above using the keywords 'ford model t,' and 'edsel.' You might get a few clicks out of it. You could instead create a custom ad for each car type, replacing the term 'old cars' with 'ford model t' in one ad and with 'edsel' in another.

Or you could create an ad that looks like this:

{KeyWord:old cars} For Sale
We have a variety of {KeyWord:old cars}
for Sale. Best deals in town!

The {KeyWord:old cars} bit of the ad tells AdWords to insert the user's keywords here, capitalizing the first letter of each word in the keywords. If for some reason the search term can't be inserted (it would make the line of the ad too long for example), insert the default term, 'Old Cars.' Different formatting of the word 'keyword' causes AdWords to capitalize the keywords differently.

As you can see, Keyword Insertion is complicated, as well as powerful. The AdWords help system has a good bit of information on how to use this feature, but the best way to learn all the nuances is to use one of the guides written by AdWords experts. Investing the time and effort needed to learn to use Keyword Insertion correctly can really improve the relevance of your ads and help you massacre your competition on Google.

I learned about Keyword Insertion from Andrew X & Steven L Jones of Google Magic Formula fame. They've got a new product out now called Google Massacre . You can check out my review of it here .