Keyword insertion may always seem like the best option for increasing the CTR of Google ads but have you stopped to think about your conversion rates when using these sometimes desceptive techniques?

One of the easiest ways to improve the CTR (click-through rate) of your ad variations in Google Adwords and other PPC platforms is to use the keyword insertion wildcard. When a search is performed and one of your ads shows, if you use keyword insertion then, wherever specified, that keyword will show and will be in bold.

NB. Google will insert the keyword matched to the query and NOT the query itself. So for instance if someone searches for “flights to Spain” and this broad matches with your keyword “spain flights” then it is this second phrase that gets dynamically inserted into your ads.

The Basics of Keyword Insertion in Google

To use the keyword insertion parameters in Google all you need do is input {keyword:Alternative Text} wherever you want your keyword to appear. When a keyword is too long for the alloted space your alternative text will be used. There are however different ways of writing this keyword tag:

• {keyword} will input the phrase exactly as it is in your campaigns.
• {Keyword} will capitalise the first letter of the first word in the keyphrase.
• {KeyWord} will capitalise the first letter of every word in the keyphrase.
• {KEYWORD} will capitalise every letter of every word in the keyphrase. Google rarely allows this.
• {KEYWord} will supposedly capitalise every letter of the first word in the keyphrase while capitalising the first letter of every other word in the keyphrase.

One of the main reasons keyword insertion generates such excellent CTRs is the fact that a user’s search terms will appear in bold wherever they appear in the advert. This leads the eye towards your ad over competing offerings. There is, however, a potential downside if your keywords, ad and landing page do not relate closely; your conversion rate can suffer if searchers do not find what they were looking for AND thus what appeared in your advert.

Take the following example based around my true life experience:

• I was directing traffic towards a flight search tool and a conversion was counted once a search had been successfully completed and the user clicked out to one of our clients/results.
• Some of the keywords I was targeting in Google Adwords included branded airline terms which did NOT appear on our tool.
• I had two ads running simultaneously; one had the {KeyWord} parameter in both title and description, the other did not contain the {KeyWord} parameter.

After running this AdGroup for several weeks it had received many hundreds of clicks and on CTR grounds, the text ad with keyword insertion wiped the floor with the competing ad. When I looked more closely at the conversion data I found, to my initial surprise, that this ad had a poorer conversion rate and that my CPA was higher than it was for the second ad.

After this I reverted to experimentation with further ad variations and eventually found a winning combination of both keyword insertion AND an ad that described my the flight tool to the user before they clicked. This led to lower CPAs and so I could increase bid prices to drive volume.

The moral of the story is: monitor the conversion rates for your adverts and not just the conversion rates of your keywords. More often than not you will be able to tweak your own use of the {KeyWord} parameter to best suit the audience and produce ads with high CTRs and even better conversion rates.

All of the major search engines have at some point claimed good user experience is at the forefront of their efforts and Google are no different; in fact they are probably the engine to crack down the hardest on black hat SEO techniques to this end where natural rankings are concerned.

But there is a second battle against poor quality, spam-ridden sites that Google has yet to win. Right now on Google Adwords anyone can reach the top of the listings, albeit the sponsored listings, by simply creating a great ad, bidding high enough and building a page that Google considers to be of significance with regards to the search query and ad.

It happens to be that third step in the process that is leading to what is, in my opinion, a poor experience for their search users. I myself often take advantage of the sponsored listings on Google thanks to their normally pinpoint targeting of my needs, but there are times when I find myself on a page full of regurgitated ads from other networks such as Yahoo or Infospace (the company behind Dogpile) and this is happening on an increasingly regular basis.

These sites avoid Google Quality Score penalties because the landing pages they build have good keyword density, partly down to the adverts they list but also because of the common practice of writing keyword rich content and making Google’s bot see it first in the page code thanks to some handy CSS tricks.

I, like many others I can only assume, swiftly hit the back button on my browser but since many internet users are not quite as savvy, these advert covered sites duly sit back and reap the financial rewards of click arbitrage. But Google, and other search engines, can fight back.

If my suspicion is true, and a good proportion of searchers bounce swiftly from the sites in question then it should not be too hard to send these listings right down to page 10 obscurity. If Google could factor in the time spent on a page into their Adwords Quality Score then targeted and genuinely useful sites would see their ads leapfrog the offending spam and Google would have their user experience boosted considerably.

Clearly their should be a threshold time limit, beyond which a page is considered relevant, because different sites will, by nature, lead to variations in the time a user spends on a page. But what I can safely say is that if a person spends less than 10 seconds on a page it is not what they were looking for.

Google almost definitely have the ability to clock these Adwords visits and thus the implementation of this idea is within their abilities, while preventing abuse of this factor should be possible. Plus, as an added benefit companies will be forced into thinking more about user experience and design to prevent bounces from their site.

All in all something as simple as time could be responsible for a better search experience for everybody.