Now imagine you're managing ads for a company that sells running shoes. So when someone searches "affordable deli sandwiches near me," your ad will automatically add "affordable deli sandwiches" to the headline and description. You can use DKI to append those terms to your ad copy. While monitoring your campaign's search terms, you notice that folks used terms like "the best," "affordable," and "tasty" in their searches. Let's say you're managing ads for a company that sells deli sandwiches. I know you're probably here to learn about dynamically inserting locations, but it's worth knowing that there are other equally awesome use cases for DKI in Google Ads.ĭescriptive keywords. Dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) use cases Basically, you tag a generic keyword in your ad's headline and description, and that keyword will change if a customer uses a keyword in their search query that you specified to dynamically appear.
What is dynamic keyword insertion in Google Ads?ĭynamic keyword insertion (DKI) is a feature in Google Ads that lets you dynamically adjust your ad copy to match specific customer search terms. It looked like I'd be able to achieve geo-targeted Google Ads campaigns (with message match) at scale.
After many hours of research, I learned about the power of dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) in Google Ads and how to leverage it in tandem with dynamic text replacement on Unbounce landing pages. Neither of the options above was feasible, but I knew there had to be a better way-there always is. Doing so would undoubtedly improve our performance, but it would take hundreds of hours and be a nightmare to manage. But that would only result in slightly increased performance over our generic campaign.ĭo the same as the first option but also create hundreds of location-specific landing pages for each respective campaign. We could:Ĭreate hundreds of geo-targeted campaigns in Google Ads with location-specific ads that linked to a generic landing page. How could we do this at the scale we wanted? We had a couple of options, but neither of them was excellent. Through our geo-targeted campaign experiments, we confirmed that targeting specific keywords, with ad copy and landing pages that closely matched the search queries of our users, led to higher performance. How to quickly create location-targeted campaigns at scale And if they click your ad, they get to a landing page that matches that search intent too.Īs marketers, we have a tendency to lean toward creativity, but in my experience, Google Ads isn't the place for this. That means that when someone sees your ad, it's relevant to what they just searched for. Message match is the practice of aligning your ad copy and landing pages to the search queries your ads are appearing for. Other folks, like the team at Moz, agree (in their case, message match in Google Ads increased conversions by over 200%.) What is message match? The exercise above made one thing abundantly clear to me: message match is a key factor for improving Google Ads performance. And don't just take my word for it. The importance of message match in Google Ads Result: Our geo-targeted campaigns consistently outperformed our generic campaigns-significantly.
For added assurance, we tested running 10 more location-targeted campaigns.
The results in phase 2 panned out exactly as we had hoped. Result: As expected, our conversion rate increased, and our CPA decreased even more. We created location-specific landing pages for each of our 10 geo-targeted campaigns and split-test sending visitors to the generic landing page against the location-specific landing pages. Result: Compared to our generic campaigns, the geo-targeted campaigns had a higher CTR and slightly lower CPA. Each campaign included the name of the location we were targeting in the ad copy and linked to a generic landing page. We started off our efforts by targeting only 10 locations. We started experimenting with manually creating location-targeted ad campaigns in Google Ads. We'd seen great results for geo-related organic search queries to our site, so we knew that we could tap into a similar opportunity with Google Ads. How we got started with geo-targeted ad campaigns