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.