Since I had to just wade through a bunch of crappy search results with people all doing their stupid content marketing and trying to sell their stuff, I figured I would make a simple post with just what I actually needed in the first place. How do you customize adwords text ads using keyword and other insertion? Here they are:
Note that there are lots of “value track” parameters for customizing urls if you want to automatically put the keyword or creative name in the url and do other stuff on your landing page. You can find that here.
This is right now all you need to work with on an easy and quick level, unless you want to dig into the shared library and create some business data. Then you can do a lot of other interesting things with dynamic ads, but thats a bit more work. Here are the basics:
City: {lb.city:default}
Postal Code: {lb.postalCode:default}
Phone Number: {lb.telephone:default} Note: you can’t have phone numbers in ads any more, you have to use a call extension or one of the new call only campaigns instead
Keyword {KeyWord:default}
For Gods sake man, pleeeease just use either {Keyword:default text} or {KeyWord:default text} which will capitalize the first word or each word respectively if you want to.
If your keyword is wedding rings here would be the result:
{keyword} = wedding rings
{Keyword} = Wedding rings
{KeyWord} = Wedding Rings
There are a couple other purported ones that are supposed to capitalize all like this:
{KEYWORD} = {WEDDING RINGS}
{KEYWord} = {WEDDING Rings}
{KeyWORD} = {Wedding RINGS}
I don’t know why I am even putting them here. DO NOT USE THEM or your ads will be dissapproved, because its a long standing policy not to allow excessive caps in text ads.
Just to show you one example,
{KeyWord:Wedding Rings on Sale} if the keyword is wedding rings, the title of the ad will be Wedding Rings, if people search for something too long, the default title will be Wedding Rings on Sale
The policies change from time to time, but note that you can still use these in description line 1 and 2. I used to use them in the display url all the time but you can get into trouble with this because of the rule with all the ads supposing to have the same display url within that adgroup.
For local marketers, the city and postal codes are pretty interesting, and are supposed to work with the location extensions, so that if you have certain branches in a certain area, the ads can automatically work with the location extension, but there are still plenty of ways you can hack these to make some hyper relevant text ads.
ENOUGH OF THE EASY STUFF
If you have plenty of time on your hands and want to go through the rabbit hole a little bit, check out dynamic ads in the shared library
Basically what you are doing is uploading a text file to adwords in the shared library, in the business data section. You are creating your own data and ad customizers. Be careful not to push the envelope too hard here, but creative people can do all kinds of amazing things with dynamic ads. Don’t forget the neato adwords script for advertising a countdown in your ads
Additionally, there is dynamic remarketing which is a whole other subject.
Anyway, the purpose of this post is to give you how do quickly do DKI dynamic keyword insertion ads, and there you are.