10 Tips for Writing Successful PPC Ads (Part 1)

Writing ads is easy, but writing great ads that get clicked can be a true challenge. For starters, pay-per-click (PPC) ads are small and are displayed on search results pages crowded with other ads and organic search listings. To make your ad stand out, every word matters and every trick of the trade you apply can take you one step closer to the sale.

To help you write effective ads that are more likely to be noticed and clicked by prospective customers, I’ve assembled this list of my top 10 ad-writing tips and strategies. Here goes:

Tip 1: Use your primary keyword in the ad title and ad text

The most prominent part of your ad is the title. The title is bright blue and underlined, and its font is larger than the ad text font, all factors that make it easy for searchers to scan the ad headlines for something that catches their attention.

What will catch their attention? The very same words they’ve just typed into Bing or Yahoo! Search.

So, simply include your primary keyword or keyword phrase in both the ad title and ad text. Your keywords will be displayed prominently in bold, showing searchers at a glance that your ad is exactly what they’re looking for.

If you were searching for green tea online, which of these two ads would seem more relevant?

Implementing this strategy is pretty easy. Just set up each of your ad groups around a very narrow, highly targeted set of keywords. For example, if you’re selling a variety of teas, you could set up an ad group for each type of tea, like green tea, black tea, Darjeeling tea, and so on. That way you could create an ad, or several ads, that are highly relevant for each type of tea.

If you’re ready for a slightly more advanced approach, try using the dynamic text (parameter insertion) feature available in adCenter to automatically insert the searcher’s keyword in your ad title or text. For more information about dynamic text, read these excellent blog posts: SEM Beginners Series: What is dynamic text? and Getting Creative with Dynamic Text in Your Ad Copy.

Tip 2: Use a relevant display URL

As a search marketer, you may not have much control over your company’s destination page URLs. They might be incomprehensible jumbles of numbers and parameters, and entirely unsuitable as display URLs. You do, however, have control over the display URLs in your ads.

The simplest approach to display URLs is to start with your company’s domain name—www.Contoso.com, for example—and then append your search keyword to it. Although search-query keywords that appear in the display URL are not shown in bold, as they are in the ad title and ad text, the presence of a keyword here will still increase the perceived relevance of your ad.

For example, if you’re shopping online for green tea, which of the two URLs shown below would you find more relevant to your search?

Tip 3: Use title caps for your ad title and ad text

Ad writers ordinarily capitalize titles and sentences in either of two ways: the first is to capitalize the first word only (sentence-style capitalization), and the other is to capitalize every important word (book-title capitalization).

Title caps tend to make ads more readable and they create a more professional and polished-looking ad. As a best practice, capitalize all the words in your ad titles and text, with the following exceptions:

• Conjunctions. (and, but, or)
• Prepositions (in, of, to)
• Articles (a, an, the)

You can also use capitalization strategically in the display URL to help improve readability and make the keywords “pop.” Notice here how the search keyword, green tea, stands out.

Tip 4: Add country code top-level domains to your display URLs

We’re getting a bit more specialized here, but just bear with me. This tip can help you simultaneously target and curry favor with customers who prefer to buy products that come from their own country.

Let’s say you’re serving ads to multiple countries or markets, in both the United States and Canada, for example. Consider creating a separate ad group for each market. In all of the display URLs in each ad group, use the appropriate country code. This simple action customizes your ad for your target market and makes potential customers in those markets more likely to click.

Of course, you must own the domain names in order to use this tip. If you don’t own a certain domain but it’s available, consider buying it and redirecting traffic from it to your main domain.

In the examples below, U.S. customers (.com country code) and Canadian customers (.ca country code) are given a clear choice.

Tip 5: Describe what sets your product apart

What benefits do customers derive from using your product? Does it help them save time or money or achieve another goal? These are good questions to ask yourself, because the answers, in your ad, will drive people to buy your product—from you, not from your competition.

Take a stab at differentiating your products or services in one or more of these ways:

• Best-in-class quality
• Large selection of product offerings
• More colors, sizes, or other feature choices
• Unique, one-of-a-kind products
• Low price
• Buyer protection programs
• Award-winning products

The ads below illustrate how to spell out product benefits.

 I hope these first five tips for creating great ads have been helpful. Stay tuned for Part 2, where I will present five more tips for writing effective ads.

Thanks!

Faith Szafranski, Technical Writer

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