Dynamic Keyword Insertion Landing Page

I spent part of today being puked on. Not the way you'd expect this blog post to start, I know, but I had to get that off my chest. For the last 3 days, I've had the flu. My son had it for 2 days, too. It was a bad cold for us. My daughter decided to break with tradition, though. So this post may occasionally include delirious ramblings as I'm still running a fever and feel like Wesley Snipes just did my taxes.

If you work in Google Adwords or other pay-per-click engines, you've likely heard of dynamic keyword insertion (DKI). It lets you use a variable to include whatever keyword a searcher uses, instead of your own. Using DKI, a headline in a paid ad for happy drugs that make the little purple elephants that keep circling my laptop go away:

Great {keyword: Nyquil} Here
Buy flu medicine online and get it
delivered before you go insane.
IansSubconscious.com/{keyword: Nyquil}

becomes

Great Tylenol Here
Buy flu medicine online and get it
delivered before you go insane.
IansSubconscious.com/Tylenol

if I search on "Tylenol", instead.

It's a known fact that searchers are more likely to click on an ad that includes the exact phrase on which they searched. So dynamic keyword insertion is an essential component of any PPC campaign. Note that there are some hazards in DKI, including my undying scorn, so be careful.

Taking Dynamic Keyword Insertion Beyond the Ad

Apply DKI to your landers, though, and you'll get even better results. Say you have a landing page with a headline:
Get Yer Flu Medication Here

If I searched for 'Tylenol', seeing 'Flu Medication' may or may not hold my attention. If you can show me this, though…

Get Yer Tylenol Here

…you've got me as a customer.

You could do this by creating a different landing page for every drug, as well as a separate ad and ad group. Good luck with that.

Or, you can do a little simple coding and set up dynamic keyword insertion. Here's how you do it:

1: Pass the keyword along

First, you have to make sure the keyword that triggered your ad gets passed along to your landing page.
In Google Adwords, you'd add something like this to your destination URL:

?kw={keyword} (if there's already a ? in your destination URL, use an ampersand & instead)

2: Set up your lander

Create your landing page as you normally would.

3: Add the tricky stuff

Now, pick your favorite web programming language. If you don't know any, pick your favorite web programmer.
They'll need to add some code that inserts the keyword into the lander in strategic places. In PHP, it might look like this:

<?php
$val = $_GET['word'];
?>
If you're suffering from <? =$val ?> you think this text is talking to you right now.

If I mangled this code please let me know. I am, at best, a mediocre PHP hacker.

4: Plan for the worst

No matter what you do, folks will find a way to type in some ridiculous combination of words that makes your page read like a David Letterman monologue:

If you're suffering from hemmorhoids you think this text is talking to you right now.

So, you'll probably want to put something in place to catch evildoers who want funny screen captures for their blogs.

The Benefits

Dynamic keyword insertion on your landing pages has several benefits:

It makes your pages more compelling. Your visitors will see a page customized just for them. We humans are egotistical beasts. We like it when things work just so. If you want a quick conversion rate improvement, DKI is one way to get it.
It improves your quality score. By having the right keywords in place on your lander, you improve your quality score. I recently added DKI to a landing page and saw the client's quality score jump from 5 to 7 on every keyword in their ad group.
It makes you into an Adwords Ninja, much like the little green ninja that are jumping around my home office right now squeaking "Oompa loompa loompity doo….".

Where to go from here

I'm going to bed.

You can learn more about dynamic keyword insertion on landing pages, and even get some code snippets that'll help you get started, on these great sites:

Dave Wooding has a great tutorial about doing this in PHP.

Hamlet Batista has written a Python script that does the same thing.

We wrote an extensive guide to getting started in Google Ads and PPC Marketing, check it out.

I've actually written my own script in ColdFusion (laugh at ColdFusion and I kick your ass). If folks are interested I'll post it, as well.