Grow your business by advertising on bing, MSN, Xbox, and more!
In a previous blog post, I covered five tips for writing successful pay-per-click ads. Here are another five for you…
Tip 6: Include your price in the ad
Displaying your price—whether it’s a promotional or regular price—can be a good strategy for a couple of reasons:
You’ll want to experiment with ads that do and don’t include price to see what works best for your products and services.
Here are a couple examples of ads that include price.
Tip 7: Include a promotion in your ad
An excellent, and easy, way to garner the attention of searchers is to promote an offer or two. A promotion can provide just that right incentive to get someone to click your ad. Try one of these ideas:
When you present an offer in your ad, be sure to use specific language. Instead of saying “big discounts,” try “25% discount” or “Buy 2 and Get 1 Free.”
Here are two examples of ads that include one or more offers:
Tip 8: Use a strong call to action
Direct marketing is all about getting potential customers to take action, to do something, right now, today. That “something” should be related to the goal of your ad campaign. Should they buy your product? Sign up for your newsletter so that you can build an e-mail list? Request a quote?
Your call to action can nudge potential customers in the direction you want. Be sure to include urgent language that encourages quick response. Here’s a sampling of possible calls to action:
The ads below provide examples of using different calls to action:
Tip 9: Use the words that your customers use
It’s smart to research and understand the age group, gender, marital status, annual income, and other factors of your typical customer. You can then use the kind of language that appeals to those people.
For example, let’s say you’re selling fairly expensive watches or gold jewelry. To attract higher-income customers, you would avoid using words like inexpensive, cheap, or low price in your ad. Instead, words like exquisite, exclusive, or designer emphasize that you are selling higher-end products. Matching your language to your audience is much more likely to result in clicks that convert to sales.
Notice how these two green tea ads contain language that’s aimed at two distinctly different audiences.
Tip 10: Refine and test your way to excellence
Microsoft Advertising adCenter rotates through all the ads in your ad group. When you’re just starting out, it’s a good idea to have a few ad variations, but after your campaign has run for a month or so, you will want to take a good hard look at your ad performance data to see which ads are the best and worst performing. Your click-through-rates and conversion rates will provide your best data.
After you have this data, take action. Delete or pause all but the best performing ads. Then consider adding one or two new ads that are variations on the best performer.
Start by modifying just the ad title so that you have a few ads with the same ad text and display URL, but slightly different ad titles. Run these new variations awhile to collect more performance data, and then pause or delete all but the best.
Then repeat this process for the ad text, trying different calls to action, offers, and benefits to see which combination gets the most clicks and conversions. This process of modifying, testing, and further refining will allow you to craft an ad that performs well for your product or service offering.
Okay, that’s the last of the ten tips for creating great ads. I hope you’ll find them helpful.
Please share your thoughts about this article, and feel free to share your own tips, too!
Thanks for reading,
Faith Szafranski, Technical Writer
Sign in to adCenter | Need an account? Sign up now
Follow us on Twitter @adCenter & @MSAdvertising | Find us on Facebook and YouTube | Share your thoughts and ask questions in the Forums | Subscribe to the adCenter Blog
Hi,
If we have a different prices for each items listing in the same ad group then how to use the prices in the ads .... I tried to work with {param2 , 3} perimeters in the ad groups but the problem is the sales team changes the items prices on the web then advertising team have to fetch these prices into the ad groups and that would creates discrepancy for site visitors....
Thanks, Raheel, for your question. Using dynamic text to automatically substitute price into your ads based on keywords is a great approach.
If you have a large keyword list, and you need to make frequent updates to the prices, consider downloading the adCenter Desktop tool. It can be found on the Tools tab in adCenter. The Desktop tool allows you to export all of your keywords, including parameters, into an Excel spreadsheet. You can then quickly update the spreadsheet, and re-import it into adCenter.
If you have any additional question, please let me know, and we'll look into it further.
This is a very valubale and highly useful article. Good for beginners like us and even the pros of online marketing.
Hi
i have tried to display mt low prices still i got Bad ROI , so what do you think is a good strategy
i have done sharp ads, accurate and detailed but still i am loosing 500$ zero buy!
I have given on ads details so that a person who knows the services do not click
Please what to do i think i am getting PPC fraudster