Tips to make sure your dynamic ads appear as capitalized in adCenter

It’s no secret that using dynamic ads is a great way to improve relevance and thereby increase your CTR, but in order for your ads to show up the way you want them to, you need to make sure you’re using the right formatting. You can learn more about dynamic ads by visiting the adCenter help files, or by reading through Charles Thrasher’s previous blog posts on the topic Dynamic Keyword Insertion in adCenter, Painless Parameters: dynamic text in adCenter, and Dynamic Text in adCenter.

If you’re using an export from another engine to create your adCenter campaigns, you’ll see the variable text appears as “{Keyword: Default}”, where Default refers to the static text you’d have as an alternate to the dynamic insertion. While adCenter accepts this format for dynamic insertion, it may not result in your ads being shown with the dynamic word capitalized. There are 2 ways to ensure that it will:

The Quick & Easy Way: Upload Your Keywords in Caps

If you’re starting from scratch with a brand new campaign, you’re in luck! All you have to do is make sure you upload your new keywords so that they appear as you would want them to in a dynamic ad. For example, if you’re bidding on “jet skis”, be sure to upload it as “Jet Skis”. If you have already done your initial upload, there is no way to change keywords that were originally added in lower case. You’ll have to take a few additional steps to make sure your keywords appear as capitalized in your dynamic ads.

The Other Way: Using “Param2” to Capitalize Dynamic Text

If you already have campaigns created in adCenter and have noticed that your dynamic ads are showing the dynamic words in lower case, there is still a way to make the correction so that they’ll show capitalized. To do so, you’ll need an export of your ads and your keywords.

In the ads file, click on any cell within the sheet and type the command Ctrl+H. This will bring up the Find/Replace dialog box. Enter in the text you want to replace, in this case, you want to remove “{keyword” and replace it with “{param2”:

Hit “Replace All” to change all matching values in the document. Once all the “{keyword” values are replaced, save this updated ads file for upload.

In the keywords file, click on the cell containing your first keyword on row 1 and then hit Shift+Ctrl+↓ (down arrow) to highlight all text within that column. Copy it and paste it into any empty column at the far right of the sheet. In this example, I’m using column P, starting with row 2:

Now, highlight the cell to the right of your first keyword, as shown above. Type the equals sign (=) in it and then go to the drop down menu shown above where it says “Q2” and look for the option entitled “PROPER”. If you don’t see it, begin typing it in that field and it will appear. Once you have that selected, a dialog box will appear asking you for a value for “Text”. Enter in the location of the first instance of the text you want capitalized. In this example, it’s P2… column P, row 2:

Hit “OK” and you’ll find that in row Q, there is now a copy of the value of P2, only it’s capitalized:

In order to have this formula repeat for all values in column P, simply grab the tiny black box (your pointer will turn into a plus sign when you’re hovering over it) that appears in the lower right hand corner of the highlighted cell of Q2…

… and drag it all the way down to the last cell that’s adjacent to your last keyword:

Now all you have to do is copy these capitalized keywords (Ctrl+C), select the first empty cell under the Param2 column of your keyword sheet and then use “Paste Values” from the “Paste” drop down menu:

Your capitalized keywords will appear in the Param2 column and should mirror all the terms in your keywords column exactly. Once this is done, delete the 2 columns you used for the PROPER capitalization formula as they’re no longer necessary. You now have your updated keyword sheet ready for upload.

Upload the updated copies of the ads and keywords sheets and now you’ll find that when you search for your ad that all dynamic terms are showing as capitalized.

If you have questions or comments about this topic please visit the adCenter forum.