google adwords: 4 reasons you should use the keywords in ad text

When advertising with Google Adwords, or any marketing platform for that matter you will need to create and specify two very important parts of the campaign: Keywords and Advertisements. They are very important because these are the two key factors that are under your control to match the advertiser or publisher with the right customer or audience.

There are several different factors that go into choosing the appropriate and relevant keywords for your campaign. Once you have chosen your keywords for a particular campaign or ad group, your next step is to create several different ads or text advertisements for the ad group. You will have to create at least one, but more than one is recommended.

Ad Creation

The process of writing or creating an ad is a creative endeavor and is usually a job for the professionals. But Google Adwords does make it much easier and faster to create ads on the fly with a little bit of effort. It is very easy to create one yourself. It also allows you to regularly modify it in order to make it better.

One of the important factor in creating an ad is to make the ad relevant to the keywords you have selected for the campaign. One way Google ascertain the relevancy of your advertisement is by matching the ad group keywords, landing page content and the ad text itself. The user reactions and interactions with the ad is also measured using the relevant metrics such as Click thru rate (CTR), Conversion Rates and others.

Importance of Keywords

As mentioned, one way to ensure the relevancy of the ad is use keywords in the ad text in a natural and human readable way. There are several advantages in doing this, all related to the relevancy and better performance of the ad itself:

Better Visibility: The keywords or words in the ad text that match the search query are displayed in a bold font on the search page. The bold text tend to attract the attention of users, which could potentially lead to a click and a conversion. Also, displaying the matching query text in bold signifies the relevancy of the ad itself to the query made by the user, which has shown to increase conversions.

keywords in bold

As you can see in the above screenshot, the keyword car insurance and auto insurance are highlighted when you search for the query car insurance.

More Impressions: Search engine algorithms tend to show ads that are relevant to the search query much more often, no matter what your bid amount. Having an ad that is optimized for a search query or keyword tend to be shown often thus generating more impressions. If your ad also happen to have a high CTR, you will also have a high quality score for keywords.

Ads and keywords with high quality score tend to be displayed higher up in the  search page and also will cost less for each conversion.

Higher CTR: A highly relevant ad with keywords in the ad headline and ad description can result in more hits and thus a higher Click-thru Rate (CTR). Bold keywords by itself does not guarantee a better performance and there is probably more than bold keywords that factor into what results in a click. When used appropriately with other good practices it can definitely help.

Higher Ad Rank or Keyword Quality Score: The quality score of the keywords are determined by a lot of factors. The relevancy of the ad to the keyword is just one of those factors. Again, appropriate use of the keywords in the ad text along with other best practices will help the ad performance.

It is important to emphasize that it is the overall quality of the ad that will result in good performance. And the use of keyword is just one of those factors. For example, if you have an ad text with grammatical mistakes, misspellings and bad text then it is unlikely that it will perform any better no matter how many times you use keywords in the text.

Dynamic Search Ads instead of Text Ads are another way of creating such ads, but depending on your keywords and campaign strategy it might not always be possible. There is also the risk of generating irrelevant ads with highly unnatural sounding sentences, which could actually be counter productive.