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When To Use Dynamic Keyword Insertion?

This question comes from Dan of Colorado:

What are the best practices for dynamic keyword insertion? When do we use them? How do we set them up?”

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Dynamic keyword insertion is something you can do within Google Ads. 

When you’re setting up your ad, instead of writing something that’s going to show all the time in your ad, you can set it up for dynamic keyword insertion. It basically takes the keyword and inserts it into the ad dynamically. Meaning, a certain part of your ad may be different depending on the keywords that are triggering that ad.

For example: 

You can just set up one ad, and set up a part for dynamic keyword insertion. Let’s say, you’re targeting a couple of different keywords: “home painters” and “house painters”. 

With dynamic keyword insertion in the ad, if someone were to search “home painters”, then your ad would say “home painters” along with the rest of the ad’s copy. The same thing goes if the person searches for “house painters”, then the ad would instead show “house painters” in the ad.

It’s important to note that it only inserts the keyword that you have added. It does not insert the search terms that people are potentially typing into Google. Your ad will not show something that’s maybe a little off the wall (or misspelled words) because it doesn’t dynamically insert all of the words in search terms.

When should I use this dynamic keyword insertion? Will it benefit me? 

I actually do not use dynamic keyword insertion. I have played around with it in the past. I have seen accounts that are using it, and I have not seen compelling evidence that shows better performance. In fact, I’ve seen the opposite.

Here’s why I don’t use dynamic keyword insertion.

If there are keywords that I’m targeting that are similar enough, I found that it actually works just fine to have the same ad written for them. If someone searches “home painter” and they see an ad that says “house painter”, It’s not going to turn them off. It’s close enough. I can write the same ads for those keywords (or vise versa). It might not even say “home” or “house” in it. The ad might even say “residential painters” or “residential painting company”. 

Simply taking the keyword and inserting it arbitrarily into the ad, often makes for a poorly written ad. I want a well-written and well-constructed ad that leads people down the path of clicking it and coming to my website. That’s really hard to with dynamic keyword insertion.

If the keywords that I’m targeting are not similar enough, then I don’t want them in the same ad group at all. Not only would I need different ads for those keywords, but it’s very likely that that traffic will perform differently. I want to be able to have more control over the performance of my ads and keywords at the ad group level when possible. I will write a normal ad for each of those ad groups with no dynamic keyword insertion.

What about putting location names within the dynamic keyword location? 

Perhaps you’re a company that targets multiple cities (Example: “house painters in Minneapolis” vs. “house painters in St. Paul”). My take would be, if it’s dissimilar enough, I would put those in separate ad groups, maybe even in a separate campaign. But as far as locations go, and as far as naming locations in your ad, you don’t need to be so specific where you’re naming every neighboorhood or suburb. I found that just that naming the main city or area works out just fine. And I have the clickthrough rates, conversion rate, and the performance to back up that claim.

What’s the bottom line?

A lot of people may disagree with me, that’s fine. There are many ways to do Google Ads. I found this way to work the best. Simply write the best ad possible that’s going to target a group of keywords. If necessary, make different ad groups only if you are targeting keywords that are different enough. You don’t need dynamic keyword insertion.