monkey!

May 17, 2008

Google AdWords Trick: Tracking Keywords

Here’s a neat trick I learned that doesn’t seem to have much documentation: Using Keywords in your Google Ads. There are actually two methods you can use these.

 #1 Within your ad

This allows you to have “dynamic” ads, as it will take the keyword the user actually typed, and place it in your ad. For example, let’s say you have an ad like so:

Your site has a variety of games, so you want to show that to the searcher. What you can do, is setup a Keyword in your ad so they’d get whatever they searched for, like so:

Great {Keyword:Games}!

What would this do? If the user searched for “adventure games” in Google, your ad would now display “Great Adventure Games!” The “Games” portion after the keyword is the default, incase their search was too long and couldn’t fit in your ad space.

Now, remember this phrase: It’s all in the keyword. What does that mean? Well, depending on how you type “Keyword” it will modify your ad text. For example:

 With this, you can get some significant increase in click rate as your ad will be more focused on the search, plus you’ll get the bolding benefits of a keyword match! Now of course, use this carefully as it can turn into wasted clicks if your campaign isn’t setup correctly.

#2 Logging the keyword

This is a simple but useful trick if you are more tech-savvy. Add the following:

?kw={keyword}

to the end of your ad url (You can also append something like  /{keyword} then write up some .htaccess ReWrite Rules). With this, you can figure out the exact keyword the user typed when they were seeing your ad. This is useful if you are using a lot of broad matches in your campaign and want to figure out what keywords people are using (Effectively, saving you money by adding the more obscure words)

So that’s it ! Two very neat and useful Adwords tricks that will easily save you a boatload of money regardless of what you are doing.