I received a lot more response on yesterday’s post than I had hoped I would. To those that did so, thanks for posting and re-tweeting my last blog post. As @Rehan so eloquently summed up my last post: “There are so many layers of evil and greed in expanded broad match. It’s pathetic”. Well put Rehan, well put.
So, I figure, let’s keep the posts coming!….
We’ve always been told that, with regards to Google ads, the headline must be no more than 25 Characters and each line of the description must be no more than 35 Characters. This is not entirely true…
[NOTE: A majority of Five Mill, Inc.'s work is in the Insurance vertical, which is a very high traffic vertical. In fact, we like to say that due to the Insurance vertical's very unique nature and the time we've spent working in it, that our greatest expertise is in Insurance SEM. That having been said, you will notice that I will tend to use the Insurance vertical for my examples. Further, I will tend to write about the Life Insurance vertical, because it's the most fun (yes, I said "fun") and I'm legally allowed to 
; We don't have a Life Insurance client. Sorry, I had to give that explanation, before readers started thinking I have some sick love for Insurance. ]
So, as I was saying, let’s take a look at a few quick screenshots.
When you search “Term Life Insurance” (one of the top searched terms in the Life Insurance vertical), you will see that SelectQuote has used the phrase “Term Life Insurance” in their title. That makes plenty of sense to me! Give the user exactly what you are searching for, especially when you are already #1. This most definitely maximizes CTR. 
One more quick example from another HUGE word, “Life Insurance Quotes”:
As you can see, SelectQuote, IntelliQuote, Matrix Direct, New York Life, and AccuQuote all use “Life Insurance Quotes” in some form in their ad. Once again, makes sense to me! MetLife, on the other hand, seems to be going with a Brand play in their ads. Can’t hate on that either.
But, now let’s take a look at two more screenshots. The first one is for “Online Life Insurance Quotes” and the second is for “Term Life Insurance Quotes”. Both of these keywords are definitely large enough that they are worth monitoring…
For the most part, you can see that we are looking at exactly the same advertisers. At first glance I thought that there wasn’t one advertiser in either example with the keyword in the title. But I found one at the very bottom, IntelliQuote (Nice work!).
The obvious question is: Why don’t they use the keyword in the title as they did in the previous examples?
And the less-obvious answer: Because those keywords are longer than 25 Characters.
Buuuutttt…. How did IntelliQuote do it!?
The final answer: Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI).
Google has an unwritten policy that the title cannot be more than 25 characters, unless you are utilizing DKI, in which case you can go up to 28 Characters!
It’s really quite simple.
It is impossible to type this as your headline in a Google ad because it is 27 characters:
Online Life Insurance Quotes
But, on the other hand, if you use DKI like so:
{KeyWord:Life Insurance Quotes}
and a keyword in your adgroup is online life insurance quotes, then the headline of your ad will read:
Online Life Insurance Quotes
There ya go, I figured a simple, yet HIGHLY EFFECTIVE, little trick was due after my long Google rant yesterday….
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Dan –
You mention in one of your posts that:
“Your history with optimized ads will lead to high quality scores and low CPCs”
And, in your latest post you mention google matches keywords when the sites they come from are better quality.
My question is to do with my site, which is continually ranked below other sites even when their keywords are less exact to the search terms than mine. I’m sure the reason is because of my poor quality score, but how can I raise it?
Thanks
I’m assuming you mean that your ads are more exact to the search terms than their ad. There are a few factors here:
1. They may just be bidding more than you.
2. They may have been advertising for a very long time with their ads: Ads with long history tend to be more likely to maintain higher positions. Further, the most recent changes with regards to landing page quality and ad quality may put them at an advantage.
3. Google may have decided that you have poor landing page quality, keyword relevance (ie. CTR) and/or a list of other hidden factors.
If you don’t see any “problems” with your landing page when you click on the little bubble near your keyword, then my guess is that your Adwords *account* quality is low.
My suggestion would be to relaunch your account. This time, relaunch your account with higher bids. We have seen studies showing that starting an account with high bids will lead to higher quality scores for the life of the account.
If your landing page quality is considered “poor” according to Google, then you probably know why (your site is a doorway page, no content, etc). In this case, redesign your site, and relaunch under a different domain.
Hope that helps!
Dan -
I love this tip! I am constantly bickering with people who think there is no value whatsoever in using DKI due to searcher behavior. People misspell things, people type in weird search queries, blah blah blah. I’ve been trying out DKI with exact match keywords simply to shove some of those longer queries in the title, and voila! It’s like a miracle.