6 replies to this topic

[Arye]

Hi everyone at HRF!

If I want to target an exact match on Adwords for a famous person does it matter if I capitalize his or her name?

For example, would [barack obama] and [Barack Obama] get the same results?
Surely it would make a difference if it was [orange] the fruit or [Orange] the big French mobile phone network.

If capitalization does make a difference then would it be best to match the exact match with the Google Ad. For example, if the exact match was [barack obama], would the ad get a better Quality Score if it read "barack obama is the President of the USA" rather than "Barack Obama is the President of the USA".

Thanks again for your time,

Arye

[qwerty]

I've never seen any evidence that search engines care about the case of letters (except in the case of URLs, where on some servers, different capitalization means a different document), but if you're talking about proper names, I'd say you have to capitalize just for the sake of correct usage.

[piskie]

I always thought or assumed that it did make a difference for Exact Matches in search phrases.

[Mikl]

I always thought or assumed that it did make a difference for Exact Matches in search phrases.

If memory serves me right, Alta Vista followed that rule. If the search term contained a capitalized word, that word would be treated as case-sensitive; otherwise, it would be case-insensitive.

As far as I know, no other search engine has ever behaved that way.

[qwerty]

Think about it from the searcher's perspective. I imagine most people type in searches the way I do -- all lower case, unless I'm grabbing text off a page and directly searching on that. So if I want to get information about Barack Obama, I'm going to search for [barack obama]. I don't think my laziness should be responded to by having the search engine boost pages that don't capitalize the man's name.

The laziness of searchers who don't bother with the shift key isn't equal to the laziness of site owners who don't bother capitalizing people's names.

[roxyyo]

There's been an adage to always capitalize each word in your PPC ads, not sure where that came from, but we did that at the PPC firm I briefly worked for. It certainly can't hurt, and it makes sense That It Attracts More Attention. Except, of course, Most Advertisers Do This, so you're not really standing out.

I tend to always capitalize and not bother testing it, because I'd rather be testing something that really sets my ad apart from competitors. One to try is actually writing a really short line, eg.

HEADLINE KEYWORDS
Line one
A longer line that makes your ad shape unusual
url.com

will make you stand out against

HEADLINE KEYWORD
Line one benefit bla bla
Bla bla download free
www.somewebsite.com

[Arye]

Cheers for the replies and for the tip about capitalizing all the words in a Adword text ad, although I think it looks a little obsessive to capitalize Every Single Word. Arye