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Lesson 6b: Keywords, Ad Text, and Ad Groups • Overview
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Writing Targeted Ad Text
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Objective: Occasionally you may choose the same keywords as your competitors. In these situations, your ad text becomes a crucial distinguishing factor. Learn how to write clear and compelling ad text and how to optimize your ads.
Poorly performing ads are vague, poorly written, or undistinguished. Successful ads are clear, well-written, specific, and compelling. Ad text should include a call to action, such as 'buy', 'order', and 'purchase'. While 'find' and 'search' may be accurate, these words imply that the user is still in awareness/interest mode, and won't qualify the user as a buyer as much as the first three. Here are two sample ads promoting the AdWords program: The first ad has been optimized. It contains clear ad text, a specific benefit to the user, and a call to action. The second ad hasn't been optimized. As you can see, it's vague, redundant, and doesn't offer any benefits or contain a call to action.
One of the most common mistakes advertisers make when writing ad text is including the company name or the website domain in the first line of ad text. This doesn't typically attract more clicks unless you're advertising an established company with a compelling brand that can distinguish your ad from others. Even if your goal is to increase consumer awareness of your brand, you should still consider ad titles that drive higher clickthrough rates and more conversions, which will eventually fortify your brand. To generate an ad title, review your ad group(s) and find keywords with the highest number of clicks or impressions. For example, if the keyword phrase 'online advertising' is clearly generating the most clicks and impressions in your account, use this term in the title of your ad. Including successful keywords in the ad title is an effective way of increasing clickthrough rate because users can see immediately that your ad is relevant to their query. Also, any keywords you include in your ad text are automatically highlighted in bold type on Google, when a user enters the keywords as part of their query. This helps draw the user's attention to the ad.
If the location of your business is important to your customers, you should include that location in your ad text to increase your ad performance. For example, if your business only offers service in Paris, you should state that clearly in your ad text. Potential customers who see an ad targeted to their location are more likely to click that ad. We recommend that you also take advantage of the AdWords location targeting feature to avoid unwanted clicks from people outside of your market area. (Please see the Location and Language Targeting lesson for more information.)
The AdWords system also offers an ad serving optimization feature for your ad text. Here's how it works: When you have more than one ad in an ad group, the system at first will show the ads evenly. Subtle changes in ad text can often have a dramatic effect on the performance of the ad, so eventually one ad may achieve a better CTR than the others. To capitalize on the success of these higher performing ads, you can automatically optimize your ad serving. Simply log in to your account, select the appropriate campaign, then click Edit Campaign Settings. On this page, you can select one of two ad serving options. You can select the checkbox next to Optimize: Show better-performing ads more often to enable your better performing ads to show more often than ads with lower CTRs. Or you can select the checkbox next to Rotate: Show all ads equally to serve each ad evenly regardless of performance.
Having multiple ads in one ad group is advantageous because you can test a variety of ad messages. (In some cases, you might find that one ad outperforms others in terms of CTR, but another ad might lead to more conversions.) There are typically two approaches to creating multiple ads. One is to create slightly different ads to see how much difference single words and phrases can make. This approach is best for ads that have already proven their relevance with high CTRs. Making minor changes to your ad text can help you fine tune its performance. Always be open to experimenting with different ad text regardless of how well the current ad text is performing. The second approach is to create completely different ads with different offers, or different features that you would like to highlight. This approach is helpful if you're creating the initial ads for an ad group, and you aren't certain what will work well. Both are acceptable approaches, and often using both approaches gives you better data on what works best. Try different offers and calls to action in each new ad. For example, you can start with this ad . . . . . . and try a different call to action. You can also try a different message completely. Remember, the AdWords optimizing feature will automatically find the ad with the highest CTR and show it more often. |
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