hey guys I have a question that has been buzzing around my head for a while.
When inputing your display url do you include the keyword at the end

ie www. domain.com/keyword.

The plus side of this is that the keyword would be bold however it could hurt the branding effort. What are your opinions?

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LandWatch.com - #1 source for land and rural retreats
Land for Sale

I want the branding to stick in their head so that they type me in next time, not find me again with a PPC. Display as the main URL IMHO.

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Cal
Orange Beach Real Estate | Eastern Shore Real Estate | Fairhope Real Estate

The Gulfshoreslife.com Team serves the Baldwin County Alabama Real Estate market from The Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay to the Southern Shores of the Alabama Gulf Coast: Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, Fort Morgan, Point Clear, Fairhope, Montrose, Daphne, Spanish Fort, AL. Referals are welcomed. For more information on AL Gulf Coast Real Estate, please contact me or visit our website.

I would just display "www.domain.com", though Realtor.com is using realtor.com/RealEstate. As a user, I only look at the display URL to doublecheck the legitimacy of the link (I don't want to click through to MFA spam). And if you're bidding for positions 1-2, part of your bid should go toward branding (so next time, the guy/gal that clicked will just go straight to your site, instead of going through Google). To catch eyeballs, the best thing to do is have the keyword appear in your TITLE tag. See the serp for "real estate"? Realtor.com stands out right now because many other ads don't contain the keyword in the TITLE tag.

Using just the domain seems to be the best choice unless the terms you are going after warrants putting /something. I saw this done well with the Four Seasons advertising for Costa Rica terms, their display URL was www.fourseasons.com/CostaRica. It makes sense there since a searcher might be looking at the ad thinking "why did the Four Seasons just come up? Oh, because they have a hotel in Costa Rica, maybe I will check that out."

If you are doing it just to get the bold on the keyword when people search, I don't see that improving the click-thru rate any, but maybe it is worth a test to see.

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Pure | Costa Rica Real Estate <-- Exchange Links with us

Dynamic keyword insertion in the ad TITLE and ad text will catch more eyeballs. If you don't have dynamic keyword insertion in place and you're using broad match, then those are the problems you need to address instead of making the display URL longer and harder to read.

I agree 100% in terms of ad copy, this question was meant to A, get a direct answer to this question based on user experience and B, indirectly question the usefulness of bold terms in paid search.

It is my hypothesis that bold words will in fact CTR thus the higher the number of bold words in your copy would increase your CTR more. I thought that including your keyword in both the copy AND the display url would be useful.

I also thought that this bold term in your display url would lead eyes to your url and thus increase your branding effort.

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LandWatch.com - #1 source for land and rural retreats
Land for Sale

Well, I disagree, but I admit I haven't done any A/B testing; sometimes people do unexpected things. You can easily set up a test and compare the CTRs (and post the numbers up here later).

As for branding, take a look at this SERP:

http://www.google.com/search?q=real+...ient=firefox-a

Compare REMAX and Realtor.com. I personally think REMAX is doing a better job by: 1) Keeping the display URL simple 2) using all caps: www.REMAX.com for more emphasis. Realtor.com's display URL does catch my eye, but because more than one word is bolded, it feels a little too "crowded", so to speak.

On the other hand, cthomes.com is totally missing out I think because the domain name is too short to attract attention (especially without the www) and nothing is capitalized.

Dynamic keyword insertion results can be garbage, depending on what the user enters. It also gets truncated many times due to limits on line widths. I avoid it, and build ad headlines and text based on similar keyword phrases to what the user enters. That seems to work better and still gets user attention and good CTR.

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Ron Goodman, GRI, REALTOR®
Prudential Colorado Real Estate
Denver Colorado Real Estate and Homes for Sale,
AdWords PPC Consulting and Support for REALTORS®
Hobby: Goodman Family History and Genealogy

That depends on how you have your campaigns set up. There are ways to have dynamic keyword insertion work in your favor.

Split test. Two ads at a time. You will soon find out which one is getting clicked on more. Then, split test that ad against another 1. Do it 2 at a time. Rinse and repeat until you have reached the desired CTR.

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