How to Personalize Your Ads and Landing Pages Using Dynamic Text Replacement

Source: Neil Patel

I have good news and bad news for you.

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first.

Ad performance keeps declining over time (on average). People are paying less attention to them and even blocking them entirely because most are completely irrelevant.

Now for the good news.

You can still get eyes on your ads if you make them relevant. You can personalize ads (and even the landing pages people see afterward) to what people were originally searching for in order to drastically increase results.

Better yet, you can use Dynamic Text Replacement techniques in order to literally save hours (if not days and weeks) of time that you’d otherwise be wasting.

I’m going to show you exactly how to use these advanced, yet powerful, techniques right after you understand why we’re going to such great lengths for personalization.

Why Personalization Increases Ad ROI

Personalization is seen as the most important future trend by most marketers.

Consumers also love it because it helps them make fewer decisions. This gives them more relevant suggestions or recommendations in real-time.

And if any marketing channel or tactic needs it right now, it’s advertising. Here’s why.

Most people today are ‘banner blind,’ so they completely avoid anything on your site that looks or feels like an advertisement.

So the first problem is performance. Banner ads typically only see a dismal click through rate of around 0.1%. That means around 99.9% of the people don’t click on your ads.

But if you think that’s bad, this second problem is even worse.

People are now going out of their way to actively avoid ads forever.

Ad blocking technology has quadrupled over the past few years. And new options like this Ad Replacer Chrome extension will also remove annoying ad placements to display topical news instead.

So what are you supposed to do? How can you fix this to still get your ads seen, clicked, and shared?

Personalization.

Big advertisers have recognized these challenges and have begun moving towards programmatic advertising.
Wait, what?

Programmatic advertising is a sort of real-time auction for banner and display networks to try and increase how relevant an ad is to you personally.

Programmatic advertising is already expected to be 50% of digital ad sales (or around $18 billion) by 2018.

However, there’s a catch with programmatic advertising. Specifically, the budget required to get on board most of these networks. We’re talking seven-figure minimum commitments.

There’s good news, though.

You can infuse your ads with more personalization using a simple technique called Dynamic Text Replacement. You get many of the same benefits, except without the high fees and complexity.

There’s an extra hidden benefit with it, too.

Personalization with Dynamic Text Replacement can help you improve message match, which both increases performance and decreases costs at the same time.

For example, the AdWords Quality Score plays a role in determining what your Cost Per Click (CPC) will be. And one of the things it measures is message match or the relevance of your ad text and landing page to somebody’s search query.

Larry Kim from WordStream found a strong correlation between a higher Quality Score with a lower Cost Per Click (and vice versa).

Here’s what Larry had to say about the connection:

Note that if your Quality Score is below average, you’ll basically pay a penalty – up to 64% more per conversion than your average advertiser. In a nutshell, for every Quality Score point above the average 5/10 score, your CPA will drop by 16%, on average. Conversely, for every Quality Score point below the average of 5/10, your CPA will rise by 16%.

Why am I boring you with all of these details? (I almost fell asleep just writing this.)

To show you that Dynamic Text Replacement will do three things for you when you start using it:

1. Increase your results (more leads)
2. Decrease your costs (lower your cost per clicks and cost per leads), and best of all
3. Save you tons of time!

Here’s how it will deliver those three things.

How Does Dynamic Text Work on AdWords?

Google recently introduced IF Functions that allow you to ‘dynamically’ (or automatically) switch out ad text based on someone’s search query.

Let’s say someone is searching for kids basketball shoes.

Typically, if someone is at their house and typing in “Kids Basketball Shoes,” it most likely means they’re simply browsing around.

The language they’re using is vague and general, which indicates that they’re probably somewhere in the middle of the customer journey still. They’re comparing brands, stores, or prices but not yet ready to pull the trigger.

However, what if you knew a little more about that person? What if they were searching for that on their mobile device, for example?

That might change things! Check out this quote from Samantha Drane:

“The way we use our mobile device is different than the way we search on desktop. Mobile is more ‘in the moment’ – maybe you’re going somewhere or looking for something near you but desktop is considered more of a research tool.”

In other words, there might be more of an urgency to buy with this mobile query. So if you can pick up on that extra insight, you can turn around and change the ad you show to incentivize the purchase.

“25% of Americans have actually made an online purchase while standing in a brick-and-mortar store,” according to BigCommerce’s Omni-Channel Retail Report.

So in this case, maybe you’d include a bigger discount or, like in the image below, free shipping.

Google’s new IF Functions allow you to use Dynamic Text Replacement to swap out ad text in this case.

Before, your call to action would have been “Buy Now!” whereas now it’s “Free Shipping on Mobile Orders!” instead.

IF Functions would basically say, “IF someone is on mobile, show them this. But IF they’re not on mobile, insert this other text instead.” Then you could create a ‘fallback,’ default text to show up in all cases where a mobile device isn’t used.

Here’s how something like that might look:

It looks complicated first pass, but it’s really not. Here’s how to read it:

• {=IF:} – This tells Google that you’re going to be using an IF Function to dynamically replace text, depending on if people match this next criteria.
• (device=mobile) – This says to show a special value (or text) if someone matches this criterion. If this happens, show them this next step.
• “text to insert” – This…

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