What does it take to make your adwords ad text stand out and get people to click on yours instead of someone else’s? Grab their attention. Peak their interest and get them to take action. Here’s how.
Often, more time and effort goes into setting up well structured adwords campaigns than time spent on writing effective ad copy. Of course it’s important to carefully choose your keywords, set up tightly themed ad groups and properly target your ads to get high quality traffic. ( I use adwords specialists for this job. ) Once the set up is done, make sure you devote adequate time to write your ads. Getting your message across in a few characters is a challenge. To help you with your task, here are 3 top tips to help you create ads with impact that get your audience clicking and buying.
But before you begin to write your adwords ad text, take time to consider what it is that you want to achieve with your ads. Of course you want to sell more of your product – that’s obvious. But take time to plan your adwords objectives and how you will measure success. Start with a clear plan, which products are you selling, what keywords will you focus on? What landing page will you use and is it up to scratch? Who are you competing with? And of course who are you targeting? The answers to these questions will have a massive impact on what you choose to write.
Once you’ve completed your planning, you can begin your copywriting challenge. Here are 3 tips to help your adwords ad text stand out.
1. Take time to craft each component of your ad
If you are new to adwords, make sure you take advantage of the options you have to convey your message. You’ve got 4 parts to your ad – that’s 4 chances to grab attention and clicks.
The headline
Your 25 character headline needs to grab attention. And it needs to be relevant to what the visitor was searching for, so it’s a good idea to include your keyword, the one that triggered the ad in the first place.
Description line 1
Use these 35 characters to spark interest in what you have on offer. You need to Stand out from competing ads so don’t waste precious characters on anything unnecessary like “and” “it” “at”. Shout about what makes you different ad how you can solve a problem.
Description line 2
Use these 35 characters to compel them to take action Make them want what you’ve got – the benefit you can offer. Then give them a call to action to make them reach out and click.
Display URL
This is the website address that you want to show to your visitors. Don’t overlook its importance. You can make it stand out fro others, by including the keyword, or by even capitalising certain letters to make it stand out from other URLs.
Here’s my ad text to give you an example. I’ve also used to site links as ad extensions, to strengthen my message.
2. Making your text fit
The fewer words, the more difficult the writing task. While undertaking your writing challenge, here is a simple counting tool to help you craft messages of the right length. It a free tool from INT. It nicely counts your available characters as you draft your text. You can find the tool here.
3. Create a few ad variations
Come up with a few ad variations to test what works best. Adwords will show you what is performing best, so remove the guesswork and try out a few different things. Let them run long enough to collect a reasonable amount of data to base your decisions on. But don’t just apply your new found knowledge to your ad text, carry it across to the rest of your marketing. Adwords is brilliant for helping you to determine what works and what converts.
So now you have a few tips to help you write more effective adwords ad text. But your work doesn’t finish with your ad text. Make sure you are clear on the on-site actions that you want to see after someone clicks on your ad. Add tracking code to your website, and set up goals so you can see if your adwords visitors convert into paying customers. Review the stats and learn from the data you collect. Then make sure to invest that knowledge in improving the performance of your ads by reducing CPC (cost per click) and conversions.
Writing EFFECTIVE text ads for adwords takes skill and time. You can find some great advice on this Google Learn page. We support a number of clients with their paid search marketing activity. The clients, their products and their markets are all different, but what remains the same is the need to do a bit of planning before any work begins. Take time to plan. Then you’ll have better luck (success!) with your ads. And for fun, be a bit competitive in the office and see who’s ads perform the best. You’ll be surprised how much this boosts your ad writing capabilities.
