Dynamic Text in Adwords Pay Per Click Ads

Want scorching click-through rates? Test dynamic text.

Its probably the single most effective pay per click ad copy best practice: Put your search term in the headline. In Adwords, if you put the search term anywhere in your ad, Google will put the keyword in bold for you, gratis. And - as every ebayer and newspaper advertiser knows - bolded keywords get clicked more.

But unless you have a single word adgroup, you won't be able to put every search term in your adgroup in the headline.

Unless... you know how to setup dynamic text.

Now, before I show you the code to create dynamic text, please read carefully. Dynamic text is powerful ppc voodoo. Used the wrong way, you can run up a mint of ad spend with almost no conversions. So, as a safety measure, before you learn how to use dynamic text, here's...

How NOT to use dynamic text

- Do not use dynamic text ad copy in an adgroup that is not narrowly (very narrowly) grouped. Before you even write the copy, look carefully at the list, keyword by keyword... can one ad speak to what all those keyword searches seek?

- Do not use dynamic copy with any list of keyword that hasn't been scrubbed by adding a negative keyword list.

How to use dynamic text

You can only have a dynamic headline for search terms that are 25 characters or less. That's the limit for titles in Adwords, and it applies to dynamic text as well. Because you can't control what people are searching for, and because their search query is likely to be longer than 25 characters, Adwords give you a default option that will show when the searcher's query is too long to fit in the headline.

Put some thought into the default phrase you use. You should also test different versions of dynamic text, including the default phrase. One default phrase may outperform another.

So, after much ado, here's the code you put in your headline:

{KeyWord:Your Title} Will put your title in initial caps
{keyword:Your Title} Will put your title in lowercase
{Keyword:Your Title} Will capitalize the first word of your title

Here's a bonus that very few people talk about: you can use dynamic text in the body of your ad copy, and even in the display url.

If you use dynamic text in your display url, you're going to need a fairly short display url, and a bunch of fairly short keywords in your adgroup. The max length of a display url is 35 characters. After the ".com" (or .net, or .org etc) and the backslash, you're down to 30 characters. That's plenty of room to fit a few short keywords into, given that the average domain name is ten characters.

But display urls aren't as good as body copy. As you probably know, there are 35 characters in play for the two lines of body copy. If you want, you can drop dynamic text in to fill the whole length of one of those lines.

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Pay Per Click Articles:
> Negative Keyword Lists: Why You Need Them
> How To Add Negative Keywords To Adwords, Yahoo and MSN adCenter Accounts
> Dynamic Text in Adwords Ads
> How To Sort Out Traffic From Google.com and Google's Search Partners