Having Trouble with Adwords Dynamic Keyword Insertion?

I’ve come across an annoying problem lately using the DKI option in Adwords. Whilst I’m a big fan of keeping Adgroups as specific as possible there’s sometimes when using the Dynamic Keyword Insertion option really saves time.

However I’ve recently been noticing that even though I’ve set the DKI on the adgroup the default ad text is still appearing in the title.

For example:

{KeyWord:Buy Playstation 3}

if you use the keyword [buy playstation 3 ohio] you would then expect the title of the ad to appear as Buy Playstation 3 Ohio. However for every keyword in the Adgroup it’ll default to Buy Playstation 3.

This is damn annoying & forces me to create more specific adgroups for almost every individual keyword. So I emailed Google to find out what is going on, this is the reply I got:

As I mentioned, Quality Score is used as a positional tool for your ad. However, if the keyword that triggers your ad does not meet a certain Quality Score threshold, then yes, your default text will be used. However, this does not have to do with what the user queries. This quality threshold is dependent upon the keyword in your account.

Riiiight, lets blame the Quality Score on everything eh. Lets think about this logically. If I have the keyword [buy playstation 3 ohio] set to go to an ohio store that sells a playstation 3 then how wouldn’t this be more relevant than Buy Playstation 3?

So, how do we get around this problem? Well, the best way to increase the quality score is to Dynamically Insert the keyword onto the page content using a script.

For example in work I track everything like this:

http://www.website.com.au/page-name/index.html?kw=buy_playstation_3_online

So I use an excel spreadsheet to generate the string needed for Adwords editor & automatically append the keyword I’m targeting to the end of the URL. Firstly, this lets me see which keywords are converting & secondly, the code on the page then calls also keyword from the URL string & inserts it on the page (it also strips out the underscores).

This means that when the Google Quality Score bot comes along it sees the relevant term on the page. Voila! Welcome back Dynamic Keyword Insertion.

The only other way around this problem is to really narrow down your Adgroups & make the ad text really specific to the keywords. Whilst this is the ideal scenario it can also be pretty time consuming. Soon we’ll look at how Adwords Editor can speed up this process & make your life much easier. More time for tweaking then