I’ve been working on Google AdWords for our Dayspring website for a while, and we’ve done AdWords for some of our clients in the past. Google recently sent us a coupon code for a free $250 in Adwords ads for an old business website of ours, Wazia. This collection of children’s book reviews hasn’t been active in a long time, and we designed it in 2005, so it looks dated. But this gave me the opportunity to try out some new things in AdWords. Here I’m going to write about keyword insertion.
Keyword insertion lets you put the user’s search terms that match your keywords into your ads. Those keywords show up highlighted in your ad, as well. This is how big sites like Amazon and eBay always seem to have exactly what you’re looking for, with your search terms highlighted, no matter how obscure.
A quick export of all the authors and titles in the Wazia database gave me my list of keywords that I wanted to target. You can often buy cheap ads for very specific things like authors and book titles. I cleaned up the list a bit, and made most of them “phrase matches.” This means that the user must search for something including “Laura Ingalls Wilder” (so “Laura Ingalls Wilder” matches, and theoretically so does “books by Laura Ingalls Wilder and her friends,” but “Laura Wilder” will not). This makes it more certain that people are looking for the book or author that we have on our site.
Then I wrote my ads using Google’s keyword insertion. They use a basic replacement syntax, so I enter my ad as
{KeyWord:Children’s Book Reviews}
Books by {KeyWord:this} and other
authors reviewed and recommended.
The brackets will get replaced by the user’s search term, or in the case of phrase matches like I have, my keyword. If the keyword won’t fit in the ad, they use the default term, which is “Children’s Book Reviews” in the first line and “this” in the second. It’s a little tricky to write an ad that sounds good with either the keyword or a default word, but this one works.
Now, when someone searches for Laura Ingalls Wilder, my ad shows up like this (as long as we don’t run out of funds):
Google ad - Laura Ingalls Wilder
Who wouldn’t want to click on that? It’s exactly what I was looking for!
I also used keyword insertion in my destination URL. Then I wrote a JSP script that takes the keyword and pulls the correct book from the database, and forwards the user to the detail page for the exact book. So my advertisement goes to something like http://www.wazia.com/wazia/pages/gred.jsp?author=Laura+Ingalls+Wilder or whatever the keyword was, which then forwards you right to the correct review.
This is very important because we want the user to see exactly what he was searching for, immediately. We don’t want to expect the user to search our site, or click around to find what he wants. Many users will only see one page on our site and we want it to be the right one.
Tags: adwords, google, keyword insertion
