Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) is a feature in AdWords that allows you to automatically insert keyword text into an ad. It is particularly helpful for ad groups that have a large number of related keywords that share the same selling points – such as model numbers for a particular product line – though it can be used much more extensively to increase the clickthrough rates of your ads. Relatively recently Google has been changing how DKI can be used, and it can cause major problems for advertisers who rely heavily on it.

The syntax of DKI looks like this:

Buy {keyword:default_text}

For “default_text” you plugin whatever text you’d like to display when your bidded keyword cannot be inserted. In the past, the main reason why a keyword would not be inserted was because it caused the line of ad text to exceed character limits. Occasionally, a member of Google’s editorial team would also mark keywords ineligible for DKI. However, Google has recently made changes that establish a minimum quality score threshold for a keyword to be inserted into ad text. This change has had some negative consequences for common uses of DKI.

Google’s new DKI policy can cause relevancy problems with Google ads. In cases where DKI is coupled with keyword destination URLs or otherwise keyword-specific landing pages; Google is often choosing to show a less relevant ad over a more relevant ad. In this case, it should never be in Google’s interest to show the less relevant ad, even in cases where their system is assigning lower quality to the keyword, as long as the landing page shares the same relevance to the keyword. Here is a hypothetical example:

Keyword:
HP XK 30300

Keyword Destination URL:
http://some-company-domain-goes-here.com/HP-XK-30300 (goes to a page all about model # HP XK 30300)

Ad:
Buy {KEYWord:HP Products}
Low Prices on all HP Models.
Order Today and Get Free Shipping!

Notice the use of “KEYWord:” in the headline . . . more on this later. But imagine that this keyword “HP XK 30300″ is in an ad group with a thousand other model numbers. Also imagine that each keyword has it’s own keyword destination URL that takes the visitor to a page for that model number (a common way to setup something like this). Now imagine that for whatever reason, Google has decided to give this keyword a low quality score (probably for ad text); also not uncommon. Because Google has given the keyword a low quality score, when a search engine user enters a query into Google for “HP XK 30300,” he/she will see an ad like this:

Buy HP Products
Low Prices on all HP Models.
Order Today and Get Free Shipping!

Instead of an ad like this:

Buy HP Xk 30300
Low Prices on all HP Models.
Order Today and Get Free Shipping!

Because the visitor is sent to a page about model number “HP XK 30300″ the first ad is misleading. It makes you think you’ll go to a generic site where you will have to enter another search, and where you might not find the model number you’re looking for. This ad will undoubtedly be surrounded by organic search results that are all specific to that model number, putting the ad at a disadvantage. Even if your keyword was scored low, it never makes sense for Google to show the first ad instead of the second one, because the second one is inherently more relevant. This is a common occurrence though for a common use case with DKI.

Back to the use of “KEYWord:”. . .  another feature of dynamic keyword insertion is you can affect the capitalization of the inserted text by using different variations of “keyword:”

keyword:
KeyWord:
KeyWORD:
Keyword:
KEYWord:
KEYWORD:

“keyword” will insert your text in all lower case: hp xk 30300. Using KEYWord will insert your text with the first word in caps and the first letter of subsequent words capitalized: HP Xk 30300. Notice this isn’t the correct capitalization for the model number; in this case, it should be in all caps: HP XK 30300. Google no longer offers this option. KEYWORD does not place the inserted keyword in all caps, it is equivalent to using KeyWord where the first letter of each word is capitalized. Because of supposed advertiser abuse of the all caps function, DKI often cannot handle acronyms properly.

While DKI is typically pretty handy, Google has made some changes that make your ads less relevant for some important cases when DKI is most suitable. For smaller keyword lists, it may make sense to break out keywords into their own ad groups with specific ad text that does not use DKI, but if this was practical to do in the first place, you probably wouldn’t have been using DKI. It’s always good to checkup on your ads though using the ad preview tool to make sure your DKI ads are displaying the way you expect them to.

AdWords Scripts allows account managers to make automated changes, reports, or alerts using a development environment inside the AdWords interface. Scripts is located under “Bulk Operations” after you log into an account. When Google announced AdWords Scripts I didn’t really pay close attention. I didn’t think I’d ever need to use it: alerts are nice, but I look at my accounts every day, so I don’t need an automated tool to tell me what’s going on; reports are great, but clients are typically looking for something very customized that also spans multiple platforms; automated bulk changes can be useful, but the AdWords Editor is great for bulk changes and there isn’t typically enough generalized repetition to necessitate a script. Despite my skepticism, it wasn’t too long before I found a use for scripts for account management.

Many businesses have fluctuating prices for their products/services, which they post online. For ads that advertise these prices, it is difficult to keep up with changes, and if you edit an ad manually you run into a couple problems:

• The ad could go “under review.” This is an ad status that prevents your ad from showing until an editor has a chance to approve the ad. If you’re editing prices and your ads go under review, you won’t have any ads showing for a period of time.
• The ad will be “eligible” but not approved before it reaches “approved” status. When an ad is “eligible,” its distribution is negatively affected – not showing on the Search Network or Display Network, or in top highlighted positions on Google’s search results pages.
• The ad’s history will be erased. Even slightly edited ads start anew with quality scores.
• It will be much more cumbersome drawing data from pools of deleted and active ads to report on ad performance.

To get around these problems, AdWords offers keyword-level ad parameters. Ad parameters are not shown in the AdWords interface or in the AdWords Editor. The only way to get and set these values is by using the API or scripts. The only values they will accept are numeric values, and they can include currency symbols. (In comparison, Bing Ads has always allowed ad parameters that are editable within the Bing Ads interface and that will allow text as well as numbers.)

To update prices in an ad, you only need to create an ad that uses ad parameters and edit the keyword parameter to display the appropriate price. In this way, you won’t need to delete and create a new ad everytime you need to update prices.  An example of a description line that uses ad parameters looks like this:

Starting at {param1:competitive prices}.

After I had my ads setup with param1 (on pause), I went about setting keyword parameters. This requires AdWords Scripts and a little bit of knowledge of JavaScript. To make it easy, I created ad group level labels, since all of the keywords that should share a certain price were setup in the same ad group. And I setup an associative array that uses the label as a key and the price as the value (sort of like a Hashtable in Java). I used the ad group labels to retrieve keywords that should have a certain price, and set that price for the ad param using an adGroupIterator and a keywordIterator and my array of prices. AdWords provides a bunch of starter code. I’m not posting mine here.

Because the company I set this up for didn’t have a feed of prices, I had to scrape them from their site using regular expressions in a separate Perl script. I didn’t feel comfortable fully automating this process because the structure of the webpage I was scraping could change (though scripts do support http requests, so it should be possible). Even though it is possible to schedule scripts to run, I manually run mine after updating the prices that my other script returns. It still saves me quite a bit of headache. Instead of spending an hour reading prices and editing them through the AdWords Editor, I spend a couple minutes running a couple scripts, without the negative side affects of deleting and posting a new ad.