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March 30

Ad Titles and Dynamic Text

Hi everyone, here's another post from Charles Thrasher about dynamic text in adCenter.
 
Thanks!
Carolyn, adCenter Community Team

 
Dynamically inserting keywords into your ad title can improve your ad's relevance and click-through rate (CTR), as I mentioned in a previous post. What happens when you dynamically insert a keyword string that exceeds 25 characters in length into your ad title? The ad is rejected.
 
Microsoft® adCenter doesn't have a default value for dynamic ads. (It's on the feature request list, believe me.)  A default value is displayed if the dynamic ad exceeds the maximum character limit. So, if you have only one ad,  a dynamic ad, -in your ad group and the keyword string is too long, your ad simply won’t appear.
 
The reality is somewhat more complex. In the case of dynamic insertion, each combination of ad and inserted text is evaluated by adCenter to ensure that it conforms to the rules. In any ad group, some ad/keyword combinations may be rejected while others are approved.
 
There are several workarounds for the lack of a default value.
 
The quick-and-dirty solution is simply to provide an alternate static ad in every ad group. If the dynamic ad fails, adCenter will automatically cycle through available ads until it finds one that works. That should be your static ad.
 
This solution may create a flurry of email, however. When an ad first breaks, it generates a rejection email that warns you of the problem*. That's a good thing, but a large ad group with a lot of long keywords can generate a lot of email.
 
A more elegant solution is to copy your keywords to another parameter, capitalize them correctly, and then replace any strings longer than 25 characters with something shorter. Excel® functions can help with the heavy lifting. (Search the help files in Excel for PROPER and LEN if you're unfamiliar with these functions.) Inserting this parameter into the ad title rather than the keyword not only ensures proper capitalization but also the proper length.
 
How might this look?
 Keyword  Param2  (before editing)  Param2 (after editing)
 brown clown shoes  Brown Clown Shoes  Brown Clown Shoes
 clown shoes pumps size 24 brown  Clown Shoes Pumps Size 24 Brown  Brown Clown Shoes
 
You can now safely insert {param2} into your ad title and not be afraid to open your email.
 
*This behavior applies specifically to adCenter accounts billed by credit card.
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