Welcome to lesson 3 – Writing Ads for PPC.
Now that you have groups of relevant keyphrases you can start to write Ads for each set of keyphrases. The combination of the group of keyphrases and the Ad(s) associated with these keyphrases will become your AdGroups. So each group of keyphrases should have a title and this title will become the AdGroup name.
Ad Formatting
Each Ad has 4 lines: Headline (25 character limit); Description Line 1 (35 character limit); Description Line 2 (35 character limit); Display URL (35 character limit); Destination URL (1,024 character limit).
Before You Start
Before you start writing Ads there are a couple of steps to take first:
Step 1: Make a list of selling points and your unique selling points for the services or products that you are writing the Ads for.
Step 2: Search for your keyphrases in Google and see what your competitors selling points are.
Step 3: Re-visit your selling points and amend the list depending on what you have learnt from your competitors.
Some obvious selling points are as follows:
Free Delivery/Free UK Delivery, Best Prices, In Stock, Fast Delivery/Fast UK Delivery, Buy Online, Sale Now On, xx% Discount, Next Day Delivery/Next Day UK Delivery, Top Quality, Huge, Lowest Prices, Huge Range, UK’s Top Provider, Free Advice, xx Years Experience, Est. xxxx etc.
It is good to have some standard selling points but your unique selling points should also be used.
Writing Ads
When writing Ads you can see that you don’t have much space so make the most of it. Make your Ads concise and to the point while making the Ad relevant to the keyphrases associated with it, including at least one selling point and prompting your target audience to click on your Ad.
As you have probably noticed; your Display URL doesn’t need to be the same as your destination URL. We recommend using this your advantage. One method is to include one the main keyphrases in as part of the URL. For Example: example.com/windows-pc. It is also useful if you have long destination URLs that are longer than the 35 character limit or non SEO friendly URLs that include variables (such as www.example.com/index.php?id=34).
Above we have talked a lot about selling points but you should also think of the type of visitor that you don’t want to visit your website because every time your Ad is clicked it costs you money. This is especially important when you provide services. If you provide services make sure you include text in your Ad to let searchers know, such as Call Our Team On or Contact Us Today phrases like these will help filter out people that are just looking for information rather than hiring a company.
Ad Variants / Testing
You can run more than one Ad for an AdGroup at a time; these are called Ad Variants and allow you to run 2 or more Ads against each other. This allows you to test different Ads and this can be extremely useful for a number of reasons. Firstly this allows you to test different Ad text; including changes to the prompts to get people to click on the Ad, different selling points, different writing styles etc. This also allows you to set different destination URLs and allows you to test different landing pages.
When testing different Ads we also recommend using Google’s Website Optimiser which allows you to test Ads with help from Google.
Ads are extremely important not only to attract the right visitors but a well written Ad can also save you money.
Google Quality Score
Google assigns a Google Quality Score between 0 and 10 to every keyword in your campaign. The higher your Google Quality Score the better that keyword will perform in the listings. The Google Quality Score for each keyword is calculated from the following core components:
Individual keyword and overall historical Click Through Rate (CTR);
Historical CTR of the display URL;
Landing page quality;
Keyword relevance to both the ad and the search query;
Other relevant factors.
As you can see from the above components; it is not simply how much you bid but the quality of your ads and landing pages are taken into account too.
Here is some more information on the Google Quality Score.
