Increase Click Through with Keywords in your display URL

I’m sure you all know the power of domain names that match your keywords.

Ask any SEO expert and they would much prefer to optimise a domain to rank high for a keyword that is part of the domain name.

The same is true with Adwords. Getting your keywords into your domain can dramatically increase your click through rate.

For example, if you were searching for mp3 players then this advert would seem very appealing wouldn’t it?

It’s the domain name in the display url that links with your subconscious and makes this ad look like it has come from someone who specialise in what you are looking for.

Great, I hear you all shout. Off we go to change all our url display names.

Hold on!!

Google Adwords recently changed the rules so that the domain in your display url must match the domain that you are sending the click to (ie: the destination url). So in our example above, you would need to own mp3players.com to be able to use that as the display url.

Now before dash off to buy up all the domains that match your keywords (assuming that they are available and that you can afford them all), let me stop you with three words.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion.

For those that do not know what it is, here is an explanation.

You can set up your ads such that the keyword that triggers the ad is inserted into the ad. This is done using the phrase {keyword}.

A lot of people who do this, tend to insert the trigger keyword into the title of the ad.

Here’s an example ad:

If this ad was triggered by the keywords “cheap mp3 players” then the ad would look like this

So now that you understand how dynamic keyword insertion works, how can it help with display urls?

You simply add your keywords onto your display url like so

www.mydomain.com/{keyword}

Now for a gotcha!

There is a problem with dynamic keyword insertion and it’s the 35 character limit that you have for a display url. If your inserted keyword pushes the display url over 35 characters then you have got problems.

One way around it is to set a default keyword that would be displayed if the one that’s trying to be inserted is too big. To do this, you would use the phrase {keyword:default} where default is you default keyword. For example, {keyword:mp3player}.

Dynamic keyword insertion in the display url can have a dramatic impact on some ads, so it’s worth testing.