Set up keyword insertion for your ad text

Keyword insertion can help improve your ads’ relevance to potential customers by automatically updating your ads with the keywords in your ad group that caused your ads to show. Learn more About keyword insertion for your ad text

This article explains the 2 different ways you can add the keyword insertion code within your ad's headline, description lines, or URL fields: the guided method or the manual method.

Before you begin

Follow some of these best practices in setting up keyword insertion for your ad text:

Group keywords logically with respect to the ad group, use one ad group per creative theme, and use dynamic keyword insertion to embed the keyword in a relevant ad creative.

Use keyword insertion with ad groups that contain keywords relating to product or service types, locations, and combinations of both.

Ensure that ads are well-structured and follow correct grammar and style guidelines after keywords are inserted.

Couple keyword insertion with a strong brand message and call-to-action.

Use only the variants of your keywords that you’d want to be inserted. All keyword match types are eligible to match close variants, so you don't need to, for example, include misspellings or ungrammatical word order variants. Learn more about keyword close variants

Ensure that ads are compliant with advertising policies after keywords are inserted.

Instructions

How to use the guided method to set up keyword insertion

1. When you're entering ad text, type a brace "{}" and select Keyword insertion from the drop-down menu.
2. In the “Default text” section, type the word or words you want to appear when the text can't be replaced by a keyword.
3. Choose how you want your keywords to be capitalized:
   • Title case: The first letter of all keywords will be capitalized. For example, “Dark Chocolate.”
   • Sentence case: Only the first letter of the first keyword will be capitalized. For example, “Dark chocolate.”
   • Lower case: No letters will be capitalized. For example, “dark chocolate.”
4. Click Set.

How to use the manual method to set up keyword insertion

1. When you're entering ad text, insert {keyword:default text} where you want a keyword to appear. Replace "default text" with the word or words you want to appear when the text can't be replaced by a keyword.
2. Capitalize the keyword depending on how you want your keyword text to be capitalized.

3. Make sure your default text is short enough to keep your ad within the character limits.
4. Avoid special characters like "é" in the display or landing page URL.
5. Save your ad as usual.

How to fix a problem with keyword insertion

Here are some common reasons why keyword insertion might not be working for you:

• Too many characters: Ads can't contain more than 30 characters in each headline, more than 90 characters in the description line, or more than 15 characters in the URL path. Learn more about character limits for text ads
• Nonsense: Inserted keywords need to make sense in context.
• Incorrect grammar: Make sure each of your keywords agrees with your syntax.
• Misspelled words: Per Google’s advertising policies, incorrect spellings aren’t permitted to show in the ad text. Keyword insertion can automatically correct spelling mistakes or show the default ad text for keywords that are misspelled. For example, “chocoolate” might be appropriate as one of your keywords but it would be inserted as "chocolate" when you use keyword insertion.
• Landing page doesn't work: Make sure your landing page URL can support dynamic text, or leave keyword insertion out of your landing page URL.
• Sexual content: Keyword insertion can't be used for content promoting Healthcare and Sexual Content.
• Dynamic Search Ads: Keyword insertion isn’t available for Dynamic Search Ads because they don’t use keyword targeting. If you’ve set up keyword insertion with Dynamic Search Ads, the default keyword insertion text will be included in your ad description.
• Trademarks: Trademarks restricted under our Trademarks policy will not insert into ad text.

Related links

• About keyword insertion for your ad text
• About responsive search ads
• Create effective Search ads