It’s easy to overlook the power great ad copy can hold over your AdWords campaigns. When motivated searchers come face-to-face with your ad, it’s the content within the ad that has the ability to influence their decision to click and continue along the path to purchase.
Before you settle for tossing ads together for the sake of launching your AdWords campaign, read through the following tips on how to create the best ad copy that will engage your audience and drive results in your campaigns.
1. Know your Audience
In Search advertising, your campaign’s performance depends on the engagement and interaction searchers have with your ads. As an advertiser, you have full control over the factors that determine whether or not users are engaged. The trick to writing good ad copy is creating ads that speak directly to your audience and provide direct answers to what they’re searching for.
Put yourself in the shoes of your audience and brainstorm reasons why they need your product or service. What are they searching for? Why are they searching for it? What questions are they asking? Why are they asking these questions? Take the time to get to know your ideal customer, inside and out, so you can construct ads to answer their questions before they even get a chance to ask.
The better you know your audience, the easier it will be to know what they’re looking for. Eliminate fluff and write ads that are to-the-point of what you’re offering so searchers in all buying stages can make an easy decision to click the ad that best fits their needs.
2. Include Keyword in Headline
Your headline is typically the first thing seen by a searcher and it sets the bar for how they interact with your ad. Aside from writing ads that speak to your audience as a whole, the headline should contain a target keywords from its associated campaign.
Including your keyword in headline ensures your ad is relevant to what your audience is searching for. This helps Google identify and show your ad appropriately and it helps the searcher identify a helpful solution.
3. Showcase your Unique Qualities
Every business is created with its own unique purpose. This purpose is what separates you from your competition and drives searchers to click on your ads and offer you their business. Use the description lines of your ad copy to illustrate this purpose to your audience.
Show them through text, why they should choose to work with your business and highlight these valuable selling points. If your business offers free shipping on all products, include a line of description text that says, “Free Shipping on All Orders!” If your business offers a lifetime guarantee, share it with your audience to showcase more compelling reasons to click your ad and the potential to turn that lead into a customer.
4. Include a CTA
Our PPC experts have noticed a pattern that some users will click on an ad, then end up purchasing a product that is completely different from what they were initially searching for. This goes to show, as much as you understand your audience, their purchasing patterns and motives can be unpredictable. Each ad you create needs to have a clear call-to-action (CTA) that will give searchers that little extra push in the right direction.
A CTA is a line of text that motivates a searcher to follow through on the action you intend they take. Reflect on your business and the goals you’re using AdWords to accomplish. Are you looking to drive foot traffic, generate sales, or submit a form? Depending on your goal, include a CTA in your ad copy that will push your audience further along in the sales cycle.
5. Speak Directly to Your Audience
It’s no secret, everyone enjoys feeling special, so use your ad copy to speak directly to your audience. Use pronouns like “you” and “your” in your ad text to include your audience in the conversation.
Your ad serves a purpose of providing a solution for your audience, so be direct and tell them exactly what they’re looking for. The use of “you” and “your” in your ad copy has the power to invoke a positive emotion to help your ad stand out among your competitors
6. Make it Sound Natural
I’m sure you’ve heard the saying, “people don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy.” This saying rings true about the effect ad copy has on your audience. Your ads are a gateway to building trust with your audience and providing them with a genuine solution. Your ad text should convey your product or service and your business in an honest and natural way as opposed to sounding desperate or insincere.
The beauty of Google Adwords is, your potential customers are actively searching for your products or services, so half the battle is won. Approach writing ad copy with the mentality that your audience is your equal and they’re simply looking for real, honest answers to their questions.
7. Test your Ad Copy
It’s inevitable that things will change. You might change your target audience, you might offer new products or services, or Google might make another change to the format of AdWords ads. While things are constantly shifting, it’s imperative for your ads to be dynamic through testing your ad copy.
Depending on who your audience is and the overall goals of your campaigns, there are many ways to go about testing your ad copy. Start by running a basic test among two or three ads in one campaign. Slightly vary the text in each ad to see what your audience prefers. For example, one ad might say:
And the other might look like this:
Give your ads some time to accumulate clicks and conversions, then evaluate performance with clear-cut data based on real interactions your audience has with your ads.
Ads don’t just generate clicks on their own. They need to be thoughtfully constructed to grab the attention of your audience if you wish to drive conversions and increase revenue. Next time you check on your campaigns, walk through these AdWords ad copy guidelines and see for yourself, the power of ad copy.
