As of December 4, 2009, Google’s search results will never be the same. Seriously, they’ll never be the same, even from one computer to another.

In our previous post, we discussed how Google personalized search will affect your business. Now, we look at how a business can influence personalized results, and whether we think that’s a good idea.

Should Businesses Try to Influence Google Personalized Search Results?

Some blackhat SEOs will say “of course, businesses should game the system any way they can.” Others might say that trying to influence personalized search results in any way is unethical (but those people probably work for Google – which, last time we checked, is neither a non-profit organization nor a branch of government). Clearly, the techniques described above could be abused; for example, an unscrupulous SEO company could trick its clients into thinking their ranks are getting better and better, or into thinking the SEO company’s ranks are higher than they really are.

But working with the system is not necessarily abuse. We always advocate 100% ethical SEO, and we advise the following: go ahead and be smart about personalized results, but never use any tactics that you wouldn’t want your potential clients or customers to find out about. Your potential customers are the last people you want to alienate – and they don’t want to be tricked or manipulated.

Influencing Google Personalized Search Results

Here are a few ways that a company could influence personalized results:

• Create a promotion with an unique or unusual name, and build a page for it on your site, for example, “Bring on the PicklePal Pickles!”. Wait for your page to indexed in Google and check to see that you’re ranking #1 for this unusual phrase. (Don’t forget to opt out of personalized search before you check!)  (As we’ve said in our book, it’s easy to get a #1 Google ranking for a unique phrase. Now there’s a good reason to do so.) Then promote the Google search results page via Twitter, for example, “Free Pickles this Tuesday! Click on our link here:http://[point to the Google page, not your website.]]”
• If you’re absolutely certain you have very high ranks for a particular phrase, you could include links to your Google results for this phrase – rather than directly to your site – in email campaigns.
• Run print ads with a callout to a Google search rather than your website. (“Hey kids, Google ‘PicklePal Pickles Forever!’ to get your pickle fix!”)  Just be sure your site stays at the #1 spot for the phrase! You may have seen something like this on billboards for the movie 2012, which suggested searching for the term “2012.”
• Run an AdWords campaign that includes a call to action telling users to perform a Google search that returns your business’s website. Keep in mind that Google has strict editorial guidelines and this tactic may require some trial and error on your part.
• Seed forums and blog comments with a search call to action where relevant and appropriate. For example, in a forum thread about finding discount pickles, a business can post a reply saying: “We are currently running a discount pickle promotion at www.mysite.com – you can Google ‘discount PicklePal coupon’ [link to the Google search result for this term] and click on the link to see the coupon.”

Caution: We haven’t tried these tactics yet – and we may not recommend them to our clients. We’ll keep you posted as we embark on this new SEO journey.

In our book, we call Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google AdWords the “wonder twins” of pay-per-click. Read reviews and comparisons of the two major U.S. PPC services, and their newer competitor, Microsoft adCenter, here.

Yahoo! Search Marketing

Yahoo! Search Marketing (YSM) [Yahoo! Link] is actually a suite of several online marketing tools, including sponsored search, local advertising, and the Yahoo! Directory submittal. However, when people talk about YSM they’re generally referring to the sponsored search – that is, the pay-per-click service. Currently the #2 service in the U.S. (second to Google AdWords, discussed below). The service has a respectably large reach, including all the Yahoo! properties as well as many meta search engines, smaller search sites, and content sites such as ESPN (see partial partners list [Yahoo! link]). Advertisers can choose to be displayed on additional sites through the “Content Match” option.

YSM ad campaigns are generally considered easier to set up than Google AdWords campaigns, but lack some of the geekier (and fun!) features, like comparing performance for multiple ads and dynamic keyword insertion. There is also an editorial review period for new listings that can take a couple of business days. Conversion tracking is included.

Rumor has it that YSM will slowly but surely become more like Google AdWords in the year 2006. Changes may include: speeding up their campaign setup, implementing geotargeting and possibly other Google-like features, and changing the PPC ranking algorithm so that it takes more factors into account, rather than just the dollar amount of the advertiser bid. [Editors' note: The late 2006/early 2007 upgrade, called Panama, reflects these changes]

• YSM’s Sponsored Search
• YSM’s Keyword Selector Tool
• YSM’s Listing Guidelines
• YSM’s Advertiser Workbook (PDF)
• All about the 2007 Panama upgrade from Yahoo!

Google AdWords

Google AdWords [Google Link] is a PPC service with a fabulous, ready-made venue for advertisement display: Google’s own wildly popular search engine. In addition, Google offers advertisers the option of displaying ads on thousands of affiliate sites linked through the AdSense program and matched algorithmically with the ad content.

AdWords offers many helpful features for advertisers, including: quick campaign setup, the ability to rotate multiple ads for the same group of keywords, advanced keyword matching options and geotargeting. One disadvantage of AdWords is that advertisers can’t just pay their way to the top of the heap – rankings are based on a number of factors, including bid price and predicted clickthrough rate. Conversion tracking is included.

Future AdWords features may include behavioral targeting, in which searchers can be targeted based on past searches or other web activities.

• Google AdWords
• AdWords Learning Center
• AdWords Program Comparison
• The Maximum Effect, a 2003 Google AdWords guide to improving ad performance (PDF) (also mentioned in our article about dynamic keyword insertion)
• View Google AdWords’ most expensive listings as of March 2006, as researched by blogger Cyberwyre.
• Google Adwords Keyword Tool
• Aaron Wall’s free downloadable PPC report
• YSM vs. Adwords on seomoz.org
• Read Overture vs. Adwords originally published on Jill Whalen’s newsletter
• Yahoo!’s John Battelle on Google Adwords
• Bruce Clay gives further descriptions and comparisons of Google and YSM.

Microsoft adCenter

Microsoft launched its pay-per-click service, Microsoft adCenter [MSN Link], in May of 2006 to compete with Yahoo and Google for a chunk of the growing SEM/PPC advertising market. The Microsoft offering follows the same basic model of the other two: advertisers pay a per-click fee to display their listings above or near “organic” search results for chosen search queries. MSN differentiated its offering with more advanced demographic targeting options than Yahoo and Google, including the capability of adjusting keyword bid costs for differing demographics (for example, paying full price for female searchers and bidding at the 50% level for male searchers). The accuracy of these demographics has been debated. The adCenter control interface, while rather difficult to use, does offer a dynamic keyword insertion feature in the ad displays that vastly improves upon Google’s dynamic keyword insertion functionality.

In our experience of early 2007, traffic levels at MSN were still too low for it to be a primary source of PPC site traffic; however, per-click costs are also significantly lower than Google and Yahoo. We were also surprised at the very strict editorial reviews that our ads received.

• Microsoft adCenter
• A Sept, 2006 article states: “adCenter Advertisers Like Returns, Want More“
• Read the adCenter blog
• Read the adCenter FAQ
• Read a 2008 detailed user review of adCenter

Q: If I’m using a keyword such as “planet orbiter” or “planet orbiters”, do I need to focus on both words for meta searches, PPC, etc. or can I focus just on “planet orbiters” and trust that a good enough campaign will yield results for the singular “planet orbiter” search as well?

A: Since search engines recognize a difference between singular and plural words, we think it is best to represent your keyword in both singular and plural forms on your website.

Despite Google taking great pride in the fact that it returns meaningfully different results for “apple” and “apples” (people searching for the single word “apple” are more likely to be seeking the company and not the fruit), for the vast majority of searches, most people would agree that there isn’t a whole lot of meaning in the difference between singular and plural searches. If you think that your searchers could be querying both words, you should optimize for both too.

This is even more important when it comes to symbols such as apostrophes and dashes in words. Search engines provide different results for mockingbirds and mockingbird’s – as well they should. Be sure to do your research to determine which is the most popular form of your favorite keyword.

For pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, it’s usually a good idea to target all variations of a multiple-word keyword phrase (“mockingbird songs” “mockingbird song”, “mocking bird song”). In the rare instances when we sponsor single keywords, we usually only sponsor the singular version and make sure broad matching is enabled so that the plurals and other variations are represented. But if this is a critically important keyword for you, it’s probably worth your while to go ahead and sponsor individual variations. Again, though, it’s not always a great plan to sponsor single keywords, so make sure that you track carefully to make sure the traffic you pay for is converting at a reasonable rate.

You may also be interested in our previous “Ask the Experts” answer about targeting variations of multiple-word keyphrases.

Q: I recently set up a Google Adwords campaign, and it contains keywords that already have great organic rankings. Is it possible that the pay-per-click (PPC) ads might take away traffic from the organic results? Also, my conversion rate for PPC is about 4% while conversion for organic search is only about 1%. Can you explain this?

A: This is a question that is close to our hearts, since we primarily focus on organic SEO (or pay-per-click in conjunction with organic). Many providers only work with PPC, and there can sometimes be a rivalry between the two approaches.

We do think that PPC clicks take away from organic traffic in the particular case when you have a high organic ranking for the same term being sponsored. This is commonly called “cannibalization” and you can read some thoughts on it in this 2006 article by Gary Angel.

To quote from the article: “we found cases where half or even more of the paid traffic would likely have arrived from organic listings if the paid ads were not present. That means that the true cost of many of the keywords being purchased was far higher than the buyer realized.”

As the article mentions, and we concur: The easiest way to tell if the PPC clicks are cannibalizing organic listings is to turn off selected sponsorships for a period of, say, a week, and then watch the organic traffic for that term and see if it goes up.

Now, you also have the complicating fact that you’re getting a higher conversion rate on the PPC listings. Our guess is that your users are self-selecting: searchers who are more likely to convert are more likely to click on the PPC listing. We’re not aware of any research proving this, but we think it’s somewhat intuitive that people who are less likely to convert (information seekers, researchers, folks early in the purchase process, job-seekers or folks with other non- commercial goals) are going to lean more toward clicking on organic listings rather that PPC listings. In that case, naturally you’d find a higher conversion rate via PPC. In other words, your organic listings are casting a wider net, while PPC listings are “cherry picking.” It’s also possible that your PPC ads are written nicely enough to grab more targeted traffic – qualifying people before they click – and may be sending them to better landing pages. If that’s the case, congrats! It’s great news for your PPC ROI.

Choosing the best strategy really depends on your needs and preferences. If you are seeking to maximize total sales, maximize visibility (the sense of “blanketing” the search results), or maximize a conversion rate per visitor, then we see no reason not to continue the PPC campaigns. However, if a more efficient ROI is a top priority, or there is a budget cap regardless of ROI, then you might try to finesse your PPC campaigns, turning off certain “high cannibalization” terms and watching conversions to see how they are affected.

Our recommendation is to track both organic & PPC conversions keyword-by-keyword using the same analytics technique, and then do some experimentation with turning on & off terms until you reach an ideal combination of spending and conversions… We know this sounds easier said than done, but keep in mind that any PPC/SEO conversion studies that might exist are much less useful and meaningful than the real data on your specific business and audience that you can gain with your analytics program.

Q: We’re huge fans of your blog, but then, we’re kinda nerdy gals.  Who is your audience, and what is the purpose of your blog as you see it?

Avinash: Are you calling me a nerd? Or maybe a nerd magnet?  I am quite ok with that (note to self: go to amazon to place an order for pocket protectors).

When I started the blog in my mind the audience was for the most part practitioners of “web analytics” and the senior management of websites / companies.

The web is an awesome living breathing organism and it sucks that analytics is still stuck in the stone ages. I am passionate about leveraging the web to get really close to our customers, to merge the worlds of qualitative and quantitative data, and to make it the most responsive lowest cost channel for anything that a company can imagine (ecommerce, lead generation, support, advocacy etc). My hope through the blog is to share that passion with more people and to broaden minds about what “web analytics” really is and how to leverage the web as a learning platform.

I am finding that in reality the audience is very diverse. Vendors, consultants, people interested in investing, product managers and a whole host of web marketing people. I am even more surprised at how much international audience there is for the blog, around 30%.

Q: We know, and you know, that analytics is fun and addictive, But so many website owners don’t actually look at their traffic analysis data – there’s something overwhelming about taking that first step.  What’s the best way to get your feet wet in analytics if you’re not an experienced marketer?

Avinash: My standard quote to a marketer is: “Without exception the web can help you earn a higher bonus.” There are two components of a bonus, usually, either you bring in more (acquisition) or you convert more (revenue). If you are a marketer start with either of those.

If you own the site start with the simplest possible report, Visitors by Referring URLs. If you are running campaigns then start by identifying which campaigns are bringing in the traffic. Really simple. Where is the traffic coming from?

Now marry that up with outcomes. Revenue by referring URLs or campaign codes etc.

In 10 minutes you now know where people are coming from and what and how much they are buying. Now look for surprises. I am positive that even with this simple data you’ll be surprised at what you find. Marry up the data with your spending. So you poured $500k into search campaigns and you got less traffic and revenue than you hoped for (or less than what you are getting from blogs). You are now in business.

Notice I did not say anything about page views or path analysis or average time on site or all those traditional metrics. IMHO those tend to not get marketers anywhere because like the rest of us those metrics really don’t “connect” and actions are hard to figure out.

Q: The pay-per-click ad services make it easy to measure the success of a paid campaign, and I think that’s partly why PPC has enjoyed such rapid growth.  But in trying to measure the success of organic SEO efforts, there’s still a lot of guesswork, expense, and a learning curve involved. Do you think Google Analytics will bring the same level of accountability to organic SEO that PPC efforts currently have?

Avinash: As an aside could I just confide that most people don’t measure PPC well. It is easier to show that you spend $10 and made $11. But most people don’t measure that $9 of that you would have made any ways just with SEO or that just the budget spent on PPC was $10 not including your salary and your agency fees and all that. True measurement of PPC effectiveness has yet to arrive at the scene, but it will soon as more accountability is demanded.

An important disclaimer first: I have absolutely no knowledge of any sort about Google Analytics’s plans or road map. {editors Note: This interview was in 2006. Things have changed since then! -gc} Any thing I say is pure speculation on my part.

Google has brought a lot of transparency and data APIs and standards, etc. to the world of PPC simply because of the amount of money spent there and the pressure on Google’s customers to show clean ROI. I think that kind of pressure will be on Google in the near future as folks increasingly spend more money on SEO and realize three months later nothing much came of it.

SEO measurement is much more complex. The success metrics are “outside” the site: page rank, page strength, results for company key phrases, your landing page quality score etc. Success metrics for PPC are in the site: conversion, purchases etc.

Google Analytics (GA) is a great way to measure website metrics (so PPC), as would be omniture or webtrends or clicktracks. Google has provided API’s now into adwords that any vendor can plug into.

For SEO the challenge that the data is outside your site is a tough one. Most of the data is with the search engines. I think Google, and others, will evolve to give us automated feeds of our key SEO metrics in order to bring more accountability to the SEO business. If they do that they might first roll it out via GA, but given the dynamics of the marketplace every web analytics vendor will have access to the data.

Q: We know you work for a large business (Intuit).  We’re curious if you think there are any analytics strategies that cross over into small businesses.  Do you have any web analytics advice that you can give to those mom-n-pop businesses out there that are hoping to improve the performance of their websites?

Avinash: The strategies or tips or advice that I mention on my blog or in my speeches might be valuable for any size of business. The strategies and approaches stay the same usually, it is just the scale of them changes. So for example a frequent advice is absolutely positively immerse yourself in segmentation. This would apply in either case. The 10/90 rule applies specially well for the small business, don’t put a lot of money into a tool to get very good world class data.

I did a very special post just for small businesses. It has a lot of tips and specific reports a small business can start with and then become more complex with time.

If I had to summarize it in a few words: Get a free tool like Google Analytics or Clicktracks, start measuring search engine traffic and referrers, look at top pages on the site that lead to conversion, measure site bounce rate (especially if you do PPC), do SEO and use the site overlay report. Viola! You are a million dollars richer!!

Q: It seems that everyone is looking for a “silver bullet:” one measurement they can look at that will indicate the overall success of their website. We’ve heard a lot of people talking about bounce rate as being this silver bullet.  Can you define bounce rate for our readers, and do you agree that this an important web metric?

Avinash: Ahh great timing, I just mentioned it above. Let us get one thing out of the way: There is no silver bullet. No matter if I say that or your grandma says that. It is a lie. The web and business on the web is simply too complex (and that is why I love it).

There are many definitions of site bounce rate but the one I have found to be most insightful is:

In % terms Site Bounce Rate = (Site visitors who stay on the site for less than 10 seconds) divided by (Total number of site visitors).

Site bounce rate is a great entry level metric. It is fantastic at identifying all sorts of, shall we say, “bummers”. If you compute it, as defined above, it is a great way to know how much site traffic is engaging with the site as a whole.

Where it becomes fun, remember I am a geek, is when you segment it out. So find out what you are spending money on and then compute site bounce rate for that. If you spending a lot on PPC compute site bounce rate for each campaign, very quickly you will find out which campaigns are sending you wrong traffic. Or you are a small business and you have paid xyz search engine $500 to list you in their directory, compute bounce rate for that traffic, see if that money was worth it.

So this is a great metric to start with. It tells you a lot and identifies some “bummers” very quickly. But then you have to get deeper into understanding the why it is happening and what you can do and how to fix it etc and you’ll graduate to other more complex metrics. By then Site Bounce Rate would have more than paid you back for the investment you made in computing it.

Q: Many business owners have goals that they want their website visitors to complete offline – things like recommending their business to other people, making a phone call, or walking into a store.  Have you worked on measuring these kinds of goals, and if so, what advice can you give to these folks?

Avinash: Multi-channel is a big challenge and everyone is making progress, not as much as one would like. Without speaking about my employer I’ll give out some general tips.

Phone is the easiest one. Simply use a unique 800 number on your website. Getting a ton of phone numbers is a very small amount of cost and it is a awesome way to know which calls are coming from the web. Now there are companies that will run your campaigns (PPC or radio or otherwise) that will put in a dynamic 800 number on your website and route the call from their “switch” to your company and in the process capturing the online to offline call. If you are small you can just do the former, use a unique number and then count.

Store is much harder.

If you own the retail store do online coupons that people can being to the store and you know they found you on the web. And it does not have to be a lot of money, I have seen a promotions for just one single pack of post-it notes if I brought this online printout thingy! Or I am sure you have seen many stores like Best Buy or Circuit City partner with BizRate. You’ll see a small survey code on the receipt in exchange for a $25 raffle (talk about cheap!) you go online and fill out a survey and tell them where you did research (online).

If you don’t own a store and you sell online and via stores this is exponentially harder, because of the “missing link” between you, website, and the selling channel, retail store. In this case user market research studies or online website surveys (that ask for purchase channel preference) have been used effectively to gauge the impact of the online channel on the offline channel.

Q: In one of Gradiva’s favorite posts on your blog, you talk about giving names to certain types of  website visitors (the abandoner, the flirt, and so on).  Why is it helpful to think in terms of “personas” instead of stats?  Do you have any other “nicknames” like these that you use in your analytics work?

Avinash: We often forget that human beings visit our websites and not “shopper_id’s” or “visitors” or “cookie values”.  The post was rooted in my hope to bring the human back into our minds. Humans interact with our website, just kooky ones like me and smart ones like you. And we are not the same.

I could write all day about personas but the main reason I love them is because they help us all step outside the “sanitized” world of numbers and think of our customers as people, atleast groups of people. Personas bring reality to our minds and then when you think of your website or analyze the numbers you’ll do it very differently. You’ll be solving for “Susan Simple” or “Tony Advanced” or “Avinash Nerd” etc.

I find that this specially works wonders with non-analysts, our management or marketers etc.

Q: How are you enjoying being a blogger?  Is it more work than you expected?  And do you blog “on the clock” as a part of your work efforts, or is this more of a hobby?

Avinash: Let me take that in the reverse order……

The blog is not a part of my work effort, it is a personal blog. I don’t want to call it a hobby (if it were I might have given it up after a week ). This is a bit corny: the blog is very much a labor of love.

I don’t have books or consulting services to sell. I am following the path of my “virtual mentor” Guy Kawasaki (he does not know I exist but I take a great deal of inspiration from his blog). His advice is “Eat like a bird, and poop like an elephant.” I am trying to live that Japanese quote. 

Blogging is much more work than I expected. I only post twice a week (my posts are usually quite long) and yet my wife Jennie’s calculation is that I am putting around 15 hours into it each week. That would include thinking and drafting and writing posts and commenting and replying to email and all that. 15 hours a week is not what I expected when I started (and it is a lot with a full time job and two beautiful little children and a wife and family and travel).

I am enjoying it very much I have to admit. I am humbled by the kind words people say on the blog and I am amazed at the reach of my little blog (I am surprised and thrilled to be ranked around 12k in Technorati) and I have met so many wonderful people (you for example) that I would never have met before. I think I enjoy it most of all because is a outlet for something I am deeply passionate about and I like to think I am adding some value in our little ecosystem.

I wanted to thank you both so much for the opportunity to do this interview, I had a lot of fun.

The pleasure was all ours!!

If you’re using Google AdWords, you should know about dynamic keyword insertion. It’s easy to set up, but do it wrong and your ads can be downright embarrassing.

Dynamic keyword insertion is a little-known function of the Google AdWords pay-per-click (PPC) service that automatically inserts a searcher’s keyword into your sponsored ad text. Many search marketers use dynamic keyword insertion to improve their displayed listings while simplifying campaign management.

It’s not easy to find any help documentation about this feature from Google. If you query the AdWords help section for “dynamic keyword insertion”  you won’t see any results, even though this is Google’s official name for the feature.  (We were able to find some information from Google on this feature –  a PDF dating from 2003 – by searching for the term “AdWords curly bracket”.) Regardless, Google’s customer support appears happy to discuss it with advertisers who have questions.

In this article, you’ll learn how to use the function, while avoiding its serious potential pitfalls.

How Dynamic Keyword Insertion Works

Let’s say you sell knockoff gemstones and your Google AdWords campaign is sponsoring the terms “diamonds” and “rubies”. You could use dynamic keyword insertion so that your ad would display “Fine Faux Diamonds” or “Fine Faux Rubies”, depending whether the searcher’s query contained the term “Diamonds” or “Rubies.” By placing a simple operator in your ad text (we explain how to do this later in the article), you can save yourself the effort of setting up and managing separate ad groups with separately written ads for each keyword. You also gain the benefit of adding a keyword to your ad text – a nice bolded keyword, no less -  which can increase clickthroughs.

Even though dynamic keyword insertion is based on the search query, it does not necessarily pluck out the exact text that the searcher entered and stick it into your ad.  The dynamically inserted text in your ad listing is limited to the actual keywords you have sponsored in your AdWords campaign. So don’t worry: even if someone searches for “totally cheapo diamonds,” the dynamic keyword insertion function will just notice the word “diamonds,” and your ad will display “Fine Faux Diamonds,” not something scary like “Fine Faux Totally Cheapo Diamonds”. (This assumes that you’re using broad matching [Google link].)

Proceed With Caution

It’s easy to set up dynamic keyword insertion, but first you need to know what you’re getting into if you decide to use this feature.  Dynamic keyword insertion can get the average greedy or lazy advertiser into trouble.

What do we mean? Well, for your edification (and maybe a chuckle or two), here are some dynamic keyword insertion train wrecks – actual ads –  that we found in only about five minutes of searching:

Distance

Looking for Distance?

Find exactly what you want today.

www.eBay.com

Spleen

Free physician-reviewed articles

on spleen.

www.healthline.com

Crack Whore

Whatever you’re looking for

you can get it on eBay.

www.eBay.com

Bandage

Find, compare and buy Furniture!

Simply Fast Savings

www.Shopping.com

Fertilizer

Find Solutions for Your Business.

Free Reports, Info. & Registration!

www.KnowledgeStorm.com

It goes without saying that you want to look at your keyword list and your ad text carefully before you use dynamic keyword insertion. It will not help your conversion goals if you display misspellings or terms that don’t work in the context of your ad.

How to Set Up Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Now that you are convinced that you need to be very careful about how you use dynamic keyword insertion, here’s how to set it up:

Let’s say your sponsored keyword list looks like this:

Diamonds

Rubies

Yellow tourmaline birthstone

Blue topaz

To dynamically insert these keywords into your ad text, you add a specially formatted string of text to your listing title or description. The basic formula is this:

opening curly bracket + keyword + colon + a default keyphrase of your choice + closing curly bracket

For example:

{keyword: Faux Gemstones}

In this example, “faux gemstones” is the default keyword phrase, which acts as a backup that will only display if the searcher’s query matches a term on your list that’s too long to display (25 characters is the limit for the first ad line).

So, if a searcher types in “diamonds,” the example above would display as follows:

diamonds

Fine Faux Jewelry Creations

www.fakerstones.com

And if a searcher types in “rubies,” the example above would look like this:

rubies

Fine Faux Jewelry Creations

www.fakerstones.com

But if a searcher types in “yellow tourmaline birthstone”, which is too long to fit into the 25-character limit, your backup keyword phrase would display instead. So, in this case, the ad would look like this:

Faux Gemstones

Fine Faux Jewelry Creations

www.fakerstones.com

Inserting Keywords into a Phrase

If you want to get a little bit trickier, you can integrate a keyword more deeply into your ad text, like this:

Simply Unreal {keyword: Gemstones}

So, if a searcher types in “diamonds,” the example above would display as follows:

Simply Unreal diamonds

Fine Faux Jewelry Creations

www.fakerstones.com>

And if a searcher types in “rubies,” the example above would look like this:

Simply Unreal rubies

Fine Faux Jewelry Creations

www.fakerstones.com

But if a searcher types the keyphrase “yellow tourmaline birthstone” (again, too long for the character limit – and your limit is reduced by 13 characters because you’ve added “Simply Unreal”), your backup keyword would display and the ad would look like this:

Simply Unreal Gemstones

Fine Faux Jewelry Creations

www.fakerstones.com

Capitalization

Did you notice that the capitalization in the previous examples looked a little funky? Luckily, Google allows you to improve upon that.  Your use of capitalization inside the curly brackets will affect the capitalization of your dynamically inserted keywords.  For example, let’s look at a scenario in which someone searches for your sponsored keyword phrase “blue topaz”.

{keyword: gemstones}

Would display as lower case: blue topaz

{Keyword: gemstones}

Would display with the first word capitalized: Blue topaz

{KeyWord: gemstones}

Would display with every word capitalized: Blue Topaz

Dynamic keyword insertion: friend or foe? If you use it with caution and monitor it closely, you might just find that dynamic keyword insertion on Google AdWords can save you significant management time and increase the relevance of your ad.