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AdWords Display URLs Now All Lower Case

April 7, 2011 by · 3 Comments 

Have you noticed that AdWords changed they way they show ad display URLs? They are now all lowercase, regardless of how you set-it up in your account.  Before the change, you were able to inter-capitalize an ad’s display URL ExampleURL.com. After the change, it will show as exampleurl.com in your ad. Apparently, the AdWords team did internal testing and found that lowercase Display URLs help increase CTR.  The data was conclusive enough to overturn the previous best practice of inter-capitalization.

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Optimize Your AdWords Ads Automatically For Conversions

February 25, 2011 by · 1 Comment 

AdWords finally released a feature I’ve been waiting for for years, a setting which optimizes your ads for conversions. You can find it by clicking on your campaign’s settings, under the ad delivery section.

Previously the options were to have the system optimize ads for CTR or to rotate them evenly. Because ads with the highest CTR do not necessarily convert best, I used to recommend most advertisers to set their ads to rotate, then manually pause those ads that are generating a lot of clicks but aren’t converting. That process was  manual and time-consuming and AdWords has come up with a smarter way to optimize your ads based on what’s truly working for you.

To take advantage of this setting, you’ll need to have conversion tracking enabled in your account and you will want to create multiple ads per ad group so the system can run them against one another. The ad that is more likely to convert will start to be preferred by the system and will show more often. Have fun experimenting!

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Enable Ad Sitelinks in AdWords and boost your CTR

July 17, 2010 by · 72 Comments 

AdWords recently announced that they are enabling Ad Sitelinks for all campaigns, which advertisers previously had to pre-qualify for. Only advertisers with very high quality scores actually saw this as an option in their accounts. Now, it’s available to all campaigns, and you should be taking advantage of it. Sitelinks allows you to link to other pages on your website with the links visible immediately below your Display URL.

Sitelinks not only acts as an extra line of ad text and provides your visitors additional navigation options, it can reportedly boost CTRs by up to 30%. To set it up, go to your campaign settings, and under Extensions, enable Sitelinks by clicking on Show additional links to my site within my ad.

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Best practices for using dynamic keyword insertion in AdWords ads

July 2, 2010 by · 2 Comments 

Keyword insertion is a tool that allows AdWords advertisers to automate their ads with a single piece of code in the ad copy. Keywords users are searching on are automatically populated into the ad, usually the ad title, possibly making the ad more relevant. To use it, you’d simply enter the following piece of code {KeyWord:Default Headline} into your ad. Keyword insertion is used most commonly in headlines. However, the code could also be placed in the rest of your ad text, as well as in your display and destination URLs.

There are many benefits to using keyword insertion, but you should also be careful to avoid weird looking ads that don’t make sense or aren’t converting for you. The table below explores some pros and cons of keyword insertion as well as my tips on how to best take advantage of it.

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