Consistency When Using Dynamic Keyword Insertion
One of the more popular options when running SEM (search engine marketing) campaigns in either Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter, or Ask is using a form of dynamic keyword insertion. There are several great guides written out there about the subject including this one from RedFly Marketing if you’re new to the subject.
Where I like to take it further is in the use of dynamic keyword insertion from start to finish. What I mean by this is that a user types in “Super Red Widget” in Google for example. Up pops an ad that has in the title exactly what I typed in, which is “Super Red Widget”. I think to myself, wow, that’s exactly what I was looking for. Note to readers: Dynamic keyword insertion is not the end all be all when it comes to text ads. There are several ads that I manage where traditional ads far outperform those which use dynamic keyword insertion, but this post centers around ads where it is effective.
After I see “Super Red Widgets” I as a user click on the ad which takes me to a landing page. Now traditionally this is where most SEM agencies and other marketers stop. Due to lack of control over the landing page or just not understanding what is possible with a decent web developer the use of dynamic keyword insertion is done. What I would suggest doing is talking with your development/technology group and asking them to try an experiment for you. Tell them you want to pass the keyword query from the search engine and insert it onto the landing page where you are driving the visitor. This can be in the form of a H1, H2, or H3 tag or it can be inserted as a Flash var if you have a Flash based website or header.
Sitting down with your developer and implementing some basic requirements is also helpful. If your keywords are particularly long you may want to put a keyword character length, similiar to what search engines do with default text in showing a standard keyword if the keyword exceeds that character length. Other requirements of capitalizing the first letter of each word and indicating a space are items you may want to take into consideration.
Don’t worry about fully understanding the implementation, but it shouldn’t take a developer more than a couple hours to implement and test this. In future posts I’ll get more into A/B and MVT solutions, but if you do have knowledge about these you can easily setup an A/B test provided that you only run this on ad groups that fully utilize dynamic keyword insertion. Send the traffic to the page without dynamic keyword insertion on the landing page and one group that has dynamic keyword insertion.
The end result is to test out the theory that having a consistent usage of the user’s keyword from start to finish results in a higher conversion rate than simply stopping at the SERP (search engine results page). You start with the user typing the keyword into Google, then seeing the keyword in your ad copy, clicking on it, and seeing it again on the landing page. In my experience this has resulted in a lift in conversion rate most of the time. There have been a few exceptions when it didn’t so my advise is to try it out, and monitor your results carefully. If it results in a lift you can expand into other ad groups and campaigns.
One tip with this is to ensure that you have all of your negative keywords properly attached so that you don’t have words associated to the landing page that you wouldn’t otherwise bid on. Chances are if you’re bidding on competitor keywords or other iffy terms you may not want to implement this strategy for the particular ad group or campaign. If anyone has implemented this or something similiar to it I would love to hear your results. Please feel free to post comments or to contact me with your results.
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