Writing Effective Ads

As I’ve said before, ad copy is king. The text you write for your search marketing ads is the most important piece of this puzzle, and your ability to produce good ad copy will ultimately decide your fate in this business. A turn of phrase can make the difference between impressions that turn into clicks and clicks that turn into purchases. Because of the performance-based search algorithms used by Google and others, when you write a better ad, you lower your costs and raise your volume at the same time. That’s the best way to get an edge over your competition. Keep four things in mind as you write your ads:

1. Use ad grouping.

2. What are you promoting?

3. Why should your targets get it from you?

4. What do you need them to do?

Use Ad Grouping.

Ad groups are sets of ads and keywords within a campaign grouped by relevance. For instance, you don’t want to write an Amazon ad for toys and an Amazon ad for college textbooks and have both ads showing the keyword children’s toys because both are grouped together and share the same keyword list. Within your Amazon campaign, you will need an ad group for toys (maybe even multiple ad groups for multiple toys and toy categories) and an ad group for college textbooks. This way, you can create separate relevant keyword lists for each distinct ad group.

What Are You Promoting?

The headline of your ad should clearly indicate what you are promoting, and the destination link of your ad should take the user as quickly as possible to the point of sale. For example, if you are trying to sell a Canon PowerShot DSC 600, not only should this be the ad’s headline, but you should be certain that the landing page your ad directs users to offers the product for sale.

If the landing page is cluttered with a number of other cameras, or if the user needs to search further to find the specific product, you are much less likely to get a sale than if you send the user to a page dedicated to ordering the Canon PowerShot DSC 600. Conversely, if you are promoting an entire line of digital cameras, your headline and ad text should be appropriately broad. You should also make sure that your landing page offers a broad selection of digital cameras. I’ll provide some specific examples later, when we build our first campaigns.

Why Should Your Targets Get It from You?

What can you offer customers to entice them to procure the product or service from you? The first line of your ad’s description is a great place to highlight low prices, sales, discounts, wide selection, or sometimes even just having a hard-to-find item in stock. Does the affiliate program you’re promoting offer free downloads? Free shipping? If the word free is applicable in some way, it is a great click booster. But keep in mind, you want to use it only when it is appropriate. If you can’t deliver on what you promised, or if the free product or service isn’t tied to your commission somehow, you may deliver and pay for an enormous number of clicks, but generate few or no commissions in return.

What Do You Need Them to Do?

If users must register with a site for you to earn your commission, or if they must pay a membership fee to participate, don’t fail to mention this in your ad. Disclosing that there is a registration process customers must go through will reduce the number of clicks you receive and pay for, remember but you are weeding out people who wouldn’t have registered anyway. Why pay for clicks that won’t earn commissions? If your conversion rate is higher, this should more than offset the burden of a lower click-through rate.

You are free to put a positive spin on this in your ad, of course. The second line of your description could read, for instance, “Low Membership Fees” or “Free & Easy Online Registration,” but be sure to let them know. Also keep in mind that proper grammar and sentence structure might not always make for the most effective ad when you are working with such limited space.

Occasionally, abbreviations will give you the extra few spaces you need to complete a more effective sales pitch. Grammatical errors such as capitalizing the first letter of certain words in the middle of the sentence can add emphasis where you want it and when you would otherwise be unable to. Using your search terms in the heading and text of the ad can also improve performance. Very small differences sometimes set one ad apart from another and make the crucial difference between two similar ads.

Select Your Keywords

Keywords are the search terms you want that will trigger the display of your ads when search engine users enter them into a search. Choosing relevant keywords for your ads is critical to their success. An ad for a specific product will likely be most successful if runs only when the user is searching for that specific product, so a very narrow list of keywords can be important.

An ad for a range of products, however, will require a broader list of keywords to really succeed. You will find as you progress that successful ads focusing on individual products will have wider profit margins but a lower overall volume of click traffic, whereas successful ads with a broader focus will have tighter profit margins but will generate higher volume.

Selecting Keywords for Narrowly Focused Ads.

The narrowly focused keyword selection process for ads promoting specific items is fairly simple. If you are promoting the Canon PowerShot DSC 600, you would certainly choose “Canon PowerShot DSC 600,” “Canon DSC 600,” “PowerShot DSC 600,” “PowerShot DSC 600,” and “DSC 600.” You might also purchase “Canon PowerShot” or “PowerShot,” although if your landing page markets only the DSC 600, you might get better margins and performance from an ad for the whole Canon PowerShot line of digital cameras, directing consumers to a landing page featuring most or all of the PowerShot product line.

You would not bid on “Canon” or “Digital Cameras,” as your ad and landing page for the Canon PowerShot DSC 600 might not appeal to a large portion of users who search for digital cameras, and, as a result, your ad would perform poorly in comparison to other ads more broadly tailored to a search for digital cameras.