Creating Successful Ad Copy for PPC

Make Effective Ads

Really, there are no hard and fast rules to it. No techniques. But keeping a few ‘essential’ things in mind will be of great guidance to a successful ad copy. A major limitation of PPC is that it does not permit you to say all that you want to; about your business; ads must comply to allowed character counts.

So, how would you write an effective ad copy then?

That throws a tough time especially if you are situated in a hyper competitive niche. To survive as a successful advertiser, you must be intuitive, compelling and relevant to the query. How do we get to be exactly there?

1. Understand the competitors

Who are your competitors? How do they promote their ads? What specific PPC features do they use? Research your competitors to understand how you could stand out from the crowd, make your ads unique and compelling, and entice users to click them.

2. Be Relevant

Your ads must resonate with what the users have searched for. Your ads must ‘answer’ to the various search queries users discover your ads by. Let’s say you are an online apparel store and a user searches by the keyword ‘buy men’s shirts online’. Your ad must offer exactly that and not ‘women’s shoes’. Using keywords in your ads can immensely help in grabbing users’ attention, and boost ad relevancy score.

3.   Features & Benefits

Why must users choose to click your ad? Tell them how you could satisfy their requirement by highlighting your product/service features. Show them why they must choose you out of the rest by enticing them to the benefits. It could be a free offer, discounts, sale etc. In short your ads must instill interest and entice the users.

4. Call To Action

Your ad is the gateway to your landing page. Tell them what you want them to do (or what they could do) post clicking your ad. Drop an enquiry? Do a booking? Call you? Request info? Include a strong call to action if you want users to act on your advertisement.

5. Error Free

Watch out your ads for grammatical, typos and punctuation mistakes. Make sure your ads are error free.

6. Multiple Ad Copies

It is recommended to have at least 2 variations of ad copies per ad group. This presents an opportunity to test different elements within the ad copy, understand which variation is more successful and optimize ad campaign according to the measured success.

7. Dynamic Keyword Insertion

This is a PPC feature that allows you to insert keywords dynamically into your ad copy, and use default text where it does not apply. This is a great feature to strike relevancy of your ad when you have a huge volume of keywords within your campaign, and writing individually customized ad copies is impractical. However, keep an eagle’s eye on misspellings and running out of context.

8. Get To The Point

There isn’t much room to waste words. Given the space of 35 + 35 characters within the description lines, avoid unnecessary words such as prepositions, conjunctions etc. Get to the point and utilize every single space to count for the ad benefit.

9. Avoid mismanagement

Is your ad seasonal? Does it reflect holidays and trends? Let’s say you are running a summer camp ad for kids during school vacation. Make sure you turn this off once the schools reopen, or you will be ruining your money.

10. Utilize PPC Features

There are various features within the PPC system that can help you create outstanding ad copies. For instance, Google AdWords offers an ad extensions feature which enables you to add site links, click to call, business address etc. in your ad copy. Utilize them to the benefit of ad performance.

11. Test

What you think is right might not be the best with your target audience. Only split testing your ad variations can determine what’s working and what’s not. Capitalization (capitalize the first letter of every word), testimonials etc. are some ideas you could incorporate and test try on your ads. As mentioned earlier, there are no rules or techniques to stick to. It’s all the work of your creativity, intellect, and experience.