Writing PPC Ads
Headline
To start off, you always want to use the keyword you are bidding on in your headline. Since Google will Bold font the keyword, your ad will stand out more and will appear more relevant to the reader.
A short cut you can take in creating your headlines is to take the top 10 competitor’s ads and copy their headlines. This might seem unintuitive because you may be thinking that you want to stand out from the crowd. Well, through my own testing of various types of ads I’ve noticed that readers will sometimes associate the language of your ad to credibility.
So if your ad is kind of gimmicky, that may attract a few clicks from the curious but is likely to result in low quality traffic. This doesn’t mean you can’t test out a few gimmicky headlines, but baseline your testing first with something more professional. Then split test some more original ads (this holds true even in “adwords overture“).
Another reason why you may want to copy competitor headlines is because it’s very likely that they have tested their ads already. You want to benefit as much as possible from any testing they have already done in that market.
Lesson #1:Ensure your keywords are in your headline . Rip off of your top competitor’s headlines |
Descriptions
After the headline, you have 2 description lines available, each with 35 allowable characters. There’s a real art in being able to write a clear and concise message within these 2 lines.
The first thing you need to understand is the difference between benefits and features. A benefit describes the results available for the reader if they click on your ad. A feature would be similar to specifications, characteristics or details about the product or service. For a more in depth description check out Feature vs. Benefit.
For example, features of a desktop computer system are: 2 Gigs of memory, processor speed (3 Giga-hertz), Windows operating system, 250 Gig hardrive, etc. Benefits associated with such a computer system would be: increase in productivity, get work done in half the time, saving time, easy to use, the convenience of having everything stored on your big hardrive, etc.
Once you are clear as to what a benefit and a feature is, you are ready to write your description.
There are a few formulas people use which will help give you a starting point.
Formula #1 – Only Benefits
Your description should only talk about the benefits of what you’re offering. The advantage of this is that it create desire in the reader’s mind. And since you are leaving out the features, it creates a little bit of mystery and the reader will want to figure out how getting the said benefits is possible.
The disadvantage is you might get less qualified visitors to your site, since some people may just be curious.
Example:
Looking for {KeyWord}?
Learn How To Get Your Leads to Pay
For Your Ads, Even If They Don’t Buy
www.AttractionMarketingFormula.com
Formula #2 – Benefits on 1st Line, Features/Offer 2nd Line
This type of ad sets up the expectation of what they will be receiving with a beneficial result in store for them. Usually, you want to start with a stated benefit, then state how they will receive this benefit.
The advantage to this is this type of ad will create higher quality clicks, but may result in a lower CTR.
Looking for {KeyWord}?
Get Your Leads to Pay for Your Ads.
Free Report Shows You How.
www.AttractionMarketingFormula.com
Lesson #2:Some pointers for writing your description are:
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Display URL
Lesson #3:
Test the display URL with “www” and without (i.e. www.AttractionMarketingFormula.com or AttractionMarketingFormula.com ) |
Destination URL
Not much to discuss here, other than make sure your display URL’s domain is the same as your destination URL’s domain. Discrepancies will result in a Google Slap.
For tracking and testing purposes, you can use ‘insert’ functions to carry important data over to your website.
For example, you can use the {keyword} function at the end of your URL to pass the searched for keyword to your website, where your PHP or Javascript page will be able to grab and store that keyword for tracking.
i.e. http://www.attractionmarketingformula.com?google={keyword}
When the user arrives at your site after clicking on your ad and for the sake of this example was searching for “google adwords”, then the destination URL will read:
http://www.attractionmarketingformula.com?google=google20%adwords
You then have the ability to call the “google” variable using PHP or Javascript and store it however you want.
Lesson #4:There are other insert functions, which are available to you. See the ‘help’ section under Google AdWords for more details. You can use these functions to help you in tracking your campaign. |
There should be plenty of information here to get you started on your first few ads for your campaign. Next time we’ll cover a critical piece of the Google AdWords puzzle that will separate you from AdWords mediocrity - “split testing”.
To Your AdWords Domination,
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| Lawrence Talent |