Google AdWords is getting to a new level of sophistication and creates more and more opportunities for us as marketers to automate our jobs, get larger impact with less efforts. Keywords bidding and matching is one of the areas where automation can help a lot.
Exact Keyword Match Changes
One of the coolest new features of Google AdWords 2.0 is the way keywords matches become more and more intuitive to searches. I talked more about matches in some of my previous articles, but now the rules are changing. The exact match type, normally triggering only the precise phrase you put in square brackets [white bread flour] now allows much more variations. Before marketers had to include every possible shortening, plural, even spelling mistakes of the phrase they want to bid for. Now the exact match has changed to allow all these variations to associate to this keyword. Moreover, now the order of words in the phrase does not matter as they can all appear together.
On one hand this makes new campaign creation much easier. On the other hand, already existing campaigns might end up with 80% of unnecessary keyword variations, all bidding against each other. Google now recommends one exact match keyword per ad group with ads having this keyword in their headlines. This helps quality score and decreases the chance of duplicating keywords.
Keyword Insertion and Other Parameters
Surprisingly few marketers are using another old feature of Google AdWords – keyword insertions. This is a great way to save yourself effort of writing many variations of ad copy. A keyword insertion means a dynamic ad which allows different phrases from the search queries to appear in the ad text. Here is how it works:
Headline is: Buy {Keyword: Flour}
You can also use this technique allow ad copy to adapt to the time, location and the search. Ad customizers are parameters which go with curly brackets. The parameter gets replaced by the dynamic text when your ad when the ad is triggered.
Let’s say you are advertising several different brands of bags but you see a lot of interest in Hermes.
Then you create an ad like this:
{=Bags.Brand} Party Clutches
www.example.com
Get discounted original bags
Prices from {=Bags.Price}
If someone is searching for Hermes Constance might see this:
Hermes Constance Party Clutches
www.example.com
Get discounted original bags
Prices start from 600£
This is quite useful if you are managing an account for a product with many variations, models or multiple locations.
