Jangro.com

Check Your Google {Keyword: } Titles

Inside the hurricane of the latest Google Adwords Quality Score update is a strange little twister that’s causing us big problems, and perhaps going unnoticed for many.

It’s pretty well known by now that in the ad text, you can put the following notiation:

{Keyword:Default text}

That will insert into your google ad the text of the keyword that the user searched for. If the keyword doesn’t fit, the “Default text” will get used in the ad instead.

Also, if you put in Keyword in CamelCase, like this KeyWord, each word in the term will get capitalized.

For example, say you have an ad group that targets different models of Apple computers. You’ve got keywords for every model. If you put the following as your Ad Title, “Buy Your New {KeyWord: Apple Computer}”, your ad title will change depending on the keyword that was searched on:

Buy Your New Macbook Pro
Buy Your New 24″ iMac
Buy Your New Mac Mini

And if the keyword text is too long, the user will see this:

Buy Your New Apple Computer

It’s great for clickthrough rates as it gets the keyword that the user is searching for into the ad. Custom ad copy per keyword. And the keyword gets bold-faced. If you’re not using this, you should be.

However, in the past week, it seems that this {Keyword:} tag has been malfunctioning. In cases where the keyword should be getting replaced into the ad, the default text is getting used. Occasionally, I will see the keyword properly getting inserted into the ad text, but after a refresh it goes away. It’s difficult to know what other advertisers are putting into this ad, but it does appear to be happening to others.

This makes for some very boring generic ads and seems to have caused our clickthrough rates to suffer.

It’s not the sort of thing that you’ll easily notice, but if your clickthrough rates have been dropping, do some searches and check your own ads. Am I going crazy? Or is this happening to you too?

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