Great Adwords Ad Copy Writing Tips

Get More Visitors, Pay Less to Get Them!

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could bring more visitors to your site on your best performing keywords rather than having to constantly dig deeper into the long tail for ever more elusive new terms to bid on? Here we’re going to look at some great tips for improving your click through rate (CTR) by writing more compelling ad copy to draw more visitors in on your favourite terms.

Creating a higher CTR on your favourite keywords will have the added bonus of not only bringing you more of that highly targeted traffic you want, it will also reduce your click costs through the associated improvement in your Quality Score for that term. So, I think that’s pretty much established the case for taking the time to write some engaging ad copy. Next, let’s look at how we’re going to do it.


Create Outstanding Titles

Let’s focus first on your title copy. Research suggests that as few as 20% of people who read the title will go on to read the rest of your ad, so if your title isn’t working for you, then there’s not much point in going any further. You need to grab their attention, be highly relevant to what they’re looking for and clear in what you’re offering.

The standard rule of title writing is to include the term being searched for. These words will be bold in the results and will add emphasis to your ad. Your title can do much more than simply reaffirm the search relevance though. You should consider various options to make your ad stand out from the crowd.

There are many methods to create compelling hooks to draw in your audience so some will be more relevant than others, depending on the specific searches you’re interested in. A few examples to consider though follow:

Ask them a question. This is an old marketing favourite, asking a question to which the answer can only be positive, for example, “Want to find the best price quickly?” or “Need a longer life battery?” By creating a positive thought response, the visitor will be much more likely to click on your ad.

Create an interesting story. Another good idea could be to tease them with a relevant story that answers their need, for example, “How I lost 10 pounds in two weeks”.

Provide clear instruction. This kind of title tells the visitor exactly what to expect on clicking, for example, “How to win at poker” or “Get this great product for £20”.

There are many more methods to consider and you can pick up some useful tips relevant to the searches you’re targeting by seeing what other advertisers are doing. This can help focus the theory into practice.

As an aside here, an interesting idea can be to buck the trend to stand out from the crowd. If everyone is advertising a product by price, it’s worth testing the relative success of advertising another product feature, or using a discount rather than a lead in price. Even if the research suggests price lead is what the market wants, bucking a trend can give you surprising, and pleasant results.


Descriptions Matter

So that’s your attention grabbing, snappy title written. You’ve done the hard part and drawn them in, so what shall we do with the description fields? For some, after trying to compress a tightly packed and compelling title into a tiny space, the description fields can seem like wide, open plains, ready to jam in all those words you wanted in the title but didn’t make the final cut. For others a copywriter’s version of agoraphobia occurs, making them rush past splashing in a few words as they go.

Of course, both these approaches are, as you might expect, wrong. The description you provide is there to reinforce the message you’re created for your title, to assure the visitor they’ve chosen the right ad, to close the deal on that wavering click.

The other hugely important factor of writing descriptions is attention to detail. Seemingly tiny changes to your writing can have a huge impact on your CTR. Nothing could demonstrate this more clearly than a test I viewed recently where the single variable being tested was the inclusion of ellipses (that’s the trailing dots...) at the end of the description. The astonishing result was an uplift in CTR of more than 200% on the version using ellipses.

Small changes to words can also shift the whole emphasis of a description too, for example, “change your life” and “changes your life” are identical excepting a single s on the end of the word change, but you can immediately see the sentence has an entirely different emphasis.

You should also consider how and when to use capitals. You could use all lower case, all capitals (it must work for something!) or capital case, so there’s another decision to be made, tried and tested there.

All this level of detail may seem like overkill for something as simple as three lines of text, but when you’re bidding on highly competitive terms, it’s the details like this that pick out the winners from the losers in paid search.


Surely Not the URL Too!

Stick with me, we’re nearly there. The displayed URL is your final change to reaffirm to the visitor that they’re coming to the right place. Don’t waste this last change to confirm that they’re doing the right thing by matching the keywords to the path of the url. It’s simple, it’s effective, so don’t forget to do it.

If you’re still not convinced that thinking about your ad copy with this level of detail is worth the effort, just try a few of the more simple suggestions made in this article and check the results. Once you start to see those numbers rack up, you’ll too become a devotee of the detail.