During the copy writing workshop in York (which I’ll write a review of when I get an hour spare) I spend 5 minutes at the front talking about Google Adwords.

I just wanted to follow up that quick review with another tip that will hopefully make things easier for you when it comes to getting your keywords into your ads. Remember, when your keywords are in your ads they are displayed in bold, so they stand out more.

The idea here is to get the keywords used to trigger your ad to be in the ad headline, therefore attracting more attention and ultimately more clicks.

This requires a couple of things. Firstly, your Ad Groups need to be well maintained with only a small number of highly related keywords in each. In other words, if you’re selling cars for example, you’d need an Ad Group for Ford, another Ad Group for Volvo, another Ad Group for TVR, and so on. You could break this down even further to Ad Groups such as Ford Mondeo, TVR Cerbera etc. but for this example we won’t go that deep.

Next, you need to do your keyword research and split the relevant keywords into the relevant Ad Groups. All this is doing is making your campaigns much easier to manage and makes the next part work really well.

You see, Google have some called DKI, which means Dynamic Keyword Insertion. And what this does is insert the keyword within your Ad Group which caused your ad to be displayed.

Now, if you are using DKI in the headline of your ad, here’s how you would do it:

{keyword:Default Headine}

Let me explain how that works. The ‘keyword’ part tells Google to insert the keyword which triggered your ad into the headline, that is, if there is enough room. Remember, you only get 25 characters.

And that’s what the ‘Default Headline’ part is for; it tells Google what the default headline should be if there isn’t enough room for the keyword, if the keyword contains a trademarked term or if it breaks their editorial guidelines.

So in the car selling example, you could have this:

{keyword:Cheap Ford Mondeos}

Side Note: There’s dodgy information out there claiming it’s the keyword the searcher used which is displayed in your ad. Not true! It’s the keyword within your Ad Group which triggered your ad that’s displayed.

Finally, there’s a few variations of the ‘keyword’ setting. You can use the following:

{keyword:Default Headine} - displays the keyword in all lower case
{Keyword:Default Headine} - capitalises the first letter of the first keyword
{KeyWord:Default Headine} - capitalises the first letter of every word in the keyword

There are a couple of others but I can’t remember what they are. The one I use in just about all cases is the last one: KeyWord.

So, will this help with your clickthrough rates? It should do, yes. As with everything related to advertising you need to test it to see which works best. Sometimes things aren’t what they seem and you must also let your target audience tell you what they want to see in your ad. Never try to second-guess them.

One final tip: please download Google’s Adwords Editor. It makes life so much easier. When I spoke about 33,000 keywords in a single campaign I wouldn’t have been able to do it without that software. And it’s free! Get it from here.

Hope that helps you out if you’re after more info about Google Adwords. If you want to know more, go to www.replytojimbob.com and I’ll see what I can do.