In a traditional advertising sense, your AdWords text is your creative, your broadcast to the world aimed at helping (or is that interrupting) people on their journey as they use Google.
As you'll know, copy in AdWords is so important since it affects several factors that all relate to your return in investment. If you make your ads relevant to the audience searching, it will:
It's a delicate balance since you want to maximise quality score and minimise cost-per-click through maximising clickthrough rate, but at the same time you don't want to pay for irrelevant clickers. So, to an extent your ad should attract and repel (those not likely to purchase) at the same time!
Ad-text for PPC is a creative art in itself, with only 25 characters for a headline and 35 for each description line it is easy to see why it infuriates so many when completing the work.
To highlight some of the Do's and Don'ts for PPC creative, I have take a screenshot which explores the creative utilised in the hyper competitive industry of "laser eye treatment":
Looking down the paid ads, some of the features of Adwords today that we need to include are:
You can see that most of the adverts down the right hand side are not targeted towards my search query. They don't include the keyword "treatment" which means their clickthrough rates will fall. Weaknesses of these ads includes...
When searching for a closely related keyword, "laser eye surgery" Google has decided to display local results as well. This highlights the importance of Google Places in both paid & natural search, it takes up large portion of the search results page. The businesses for this search query are much more on the ball, 80% are making good use of keywords in headlines and descriptions.
The example below takes full advantage of the features within Google Adwords to create a useful advert, with the location, telephone number, reviews, site links to useful resources and getting across their value proposition "No 1 provider":
By Chris Soames
Chris Soames is a Smart Insights blogger and consultant, he has worked in digital marketing for over 6 years with the last few years managing international web strategies for a leading travel brand. Now the Commercial Director at First 10, an Integrated marketing agency, he helps clients get clarity on their marketing strategy and create campaigns engineered to engage with their consumers to help drive sell-through. Most of all, Chris enjoys working with talented people who want to create great (& commercial) things not just tick boxes.
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