How To Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Dynamic Keyword Insertion or DKI is a pretty neat tool for pay-per-click account managers. I guess you could call it a hack, as it’s essentially a piece of code inserted into the ad text to dynamically change the ad in response to user queries for which the ad will display. When used correctly, this piece of code can dramatically increase CTR and thus quality score.

How Does DKI Increase CTR?

Well, first thing’s first. Let’s talk about the role of relevance in how ads are displayed. It’s probably no secret that all search engines, ad platforms, and advertisers are interested in displaying the most relevant ads to their users. This just makes sense, the more relevant the ad the more effective and everybody wins. If you’ve noticed while you’re Googling, Yahooing, or Binging around the web, relevance of the ads that are displayed in reply to user queries are rewarded with bolding of the ad text that matches that user query.

For example if we search ‘Toyota oil change coupons’, each time a keyword in our query is included in the ad text displayed that keyword is bolded.

DKI allows you to achieve this bolding on each ad within your pay-per-click account dynamically without writing a single ad for each possible user query.

Why Is This Important?

This bolding helps your ads to stand out against the other ads that are showing in response to this user query. The search engines highlight the ads that closest relate to what the user is searching for so the most relevant ads stand out and are clicked over the others to help ensure a positive search experience for the user. They found what they were searching for.

This in-turn helps you get the click over the competition, thus increasing your CTR. Since relevance and CTR is are heavily weighted factors of quality score, quality scores will be positively affected by the correct use of DKI.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion Code

DKI works by placing the dynamic keyword insertion code into your ad text from within your pay-per-click account.

The DKI code looks like this:

Place this code in your ad anywhere you’d like the ad text to dynamically change in response to a user query and replace ‘Default’ with the text you’d like to show if for some reason the dynamic changes do not occur.

For example, here is an ad from our Google Analytics Premium campaign. We’ve chosen to use DKI in the headline, which means as users search and our ad wins the auctions to display to users the headline will change to match their query. If for some reason the headline does not change to match the user query it will read ‘GA Premium Edition’.

How Do Advertisers Keep Control of Their Ad Text?

DKI will only change the ad text to match a user query if the keywords in the user query are also present in the adgroup where the ad text lives.

For example, the GA Premium Edition ad above lives in an adgroup with the following keywords:

User queries that match any of the keywords in this adgroup will trigger the DKI code and dynamically change the ad text.

If a user searches ‘analytics premium edition’, the ad text will change to display the following:

However, if a user searches ‘google analytics premium edition’ the ad will display as follows using the default text since the user query exceeds the character limit of the headline.

Use of DKI in your AdWords and AdCenter accounts can give you an extra boost in CTR and quality score when used correctly. Test this tool in your accounts and let us know how you fair.