Writing Effective Ads

Writing compelling ads can help increase your click through rate and campaign ROI and improve your quality score and search traffic. The importance of writing compelling ads is to get your customers to click on your ad rather than your competitors’ ads. It is recommended to write about the benefits your product or service offers to distinguish you from your competitors. You can highlight your low price, protection/insurance incentives, product offerings, why your product/service is better, include your low price/promotion, and best features of your products/services.

Since networks allow as many as 20 ads per ad group, I would recommend writing at least 3 ads or more per ad group and keep them all in rotation to see which are the best performers. After the rotation cycle, deleting the poor performing (click through rate and low ad rank) ads as the networks will keep historical data for the poor performing ads thus decreasing your quality score and ad rank. Also keep in mind to write your ads based on your target consumers such as their age group, gender and geo location so that is relevant to what your consumers are searching for. We find it best to create personas for your audience.

Keep your ads specific on what you are offering and include a strong call to action to urge your consumers to click on your ad. Here are some examples:

• See Here for Extra Savings Now!
• Sign Up Today to Receive Your Newsletter
• Sign Up Now for This Limited Time Offer
• Buy 2 and Get 1 Free
• Try a Sample Today

This will encourage a higher click through rate.

It is also important to meet network editorial guidelines soyour ads do not get paused. See URLs below for adCenter and Google Adwords policy.

adCenter:

• http://adcenterhelp.microsoft.com/help.aspx?project=adcenter_live_std&market=en-us&querytype=topic&query=moonshot_conc_editorialguidelines.htm
• http://advertising.microsoft.com/small-business/search-advertising/ad-content-guidelines

Google Adwords: 

• http://support.google.com/adwords/certification/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=152216
• http://support.google.com/adwords/certification/bin/static.py?hl=en&page=guide.cs&guide=23679&topic=23682

One of the best ways to improve your ad relevance is by using your customers’ most popular search query keywords in your ad titles and ads. Your keywords will be shown in bold font, where searchers at a glance will see exactly what they’re looking for in your ad. This method in AdCenter is called Dynamic Text (parameter insertion). Using this feature will automatically insert the searcher’s keyword in your ad title or text. In Google Adwords, it is called Dynamic Keyword Insertion. See examples below on how your ad will be displayed.

adCenter:

Premium Roast Coffee

Enjoy the Taste of Roast Coffee. Enjoy 15% off All Orders Today!

www.roastcoffeeinc.com

Google Adwords:

Premium Roast Coffee

Enjoy the Taste of Roast

Coffee. 15% off All Orders Now!

www.roastcoffeeinc.com

It is a good idea to use title caps for your ad title and ads which allows your ads to be more readable. As a best practice, capitalize all the words in your titles and ads with the following exceptions:

• Conjunctions. (and, but, or)
• Prepositions (in, of, to)
• Articles (a, an, the)

You want to make sure your display URLs states your company’s domain name for example www.roastcoffeeinc.com. You can append your search keyword to your display URL, which will not be shown as bold font but the searched keyword/s will still increase relevance for your ad. Here is what the appended display URL will appear as: www.roastcoffeeinc.com/roastcoffee.

You can also use capitalization in the display URL to help improve readability and make the keywords stand out. For example, www.RoastCoffeeInc.com/RoastCoffee.

If you are serving ads to international countries, you can add the country code to your display URL. For example, www.RoastCoffeeInc.fr/RoastCoffee. Note “fr” in the display URL stands for France.

Lastly it is important for your destination URL and landing pages to be relevant to one another so that your consumers are directed to a page on your website that relates to the ad they clicked on.

Now go ahead and write your own ad copies and see the results!