Creating Text Ads in Google Adwords to Increase ROI

As anyone who has work with Google AdWords, optimizing any part of a PPC campaign can be tricky. It requires a little bit of guess work as well as knowing Googles “Best Practices” like the back of your hand. Similarly, the digital world is constantly changing, meaning Google likes to keep us marketers on out toes. Anyway, writing Google Adwords text ads is like an art, it can be done many different ways to produce results. While the “best” way is open to interpretation I would like to take some time to talk about what factors go into writing the text and and what some of the best practices are for pleasing the Google Gods and maximizing ROI. Lets use a fictional umbrella website as an example.

Your Selling Point

What makes your brand stand out? Why should customers choose you over the competition? Do you have the best quality, greatest selection, best customer service? Make sure you include this information in your ads. If your customers already know you, then this will remind them why they want your products. If they don’t know you, this is you chance to sell them on your products- so make it count. Like all marketing, its best to be able to quanlify. Include things like pricing, promotions, exclusive offers, etc. The more qualified your ad is, the more qualified customers will be clicking. Vague offerings may generate higher click counts but likely result in lower conversion rates. It’s important to get customers who are actually interested in converting to click on your ad.

Call to Action

Even for branding purposes, a strong call to action is probably one of the most important elements to text ad copy. Simply stating facts, branding, or products in an ad doesnt encourage your customers to take action. Use strong words that demand action for the best results. Depending on what type of conversion you are looking for this could be anything from Call Now! to Buy Today! or even Request Information Here! Make the ad copy clear so that there is no doubt in your customers mind what they should do.

Keywords Keywords Keywords

Including keywords in your ad copy is beneficial in two main ways. 1st is that it increases relevance both the user and Google. Obviously users are looking for things related to the keyword they’ve typed in – if you put their keyword in the header, this is exceptionally relevant to them.  Google also uses Ad Relevance to determine quality scores, and thus placements.  The more relevant Google thinks your ad is, the better placements you’ll get.  The second reason is that keywords that match up appear in bold, drawing even more attention to your ads and increasing the likelihood that your customer will click on your ad.

Quality Score

Landing page experience has a huge affect on conversion rates, bounce rates, and quality score. Google looks to make the users experience as beneficial as possible, so if your landing page doesn’t have much to do with your ad or keywords they will rank your ad poorly. Make sure your ad links to a page that has relevant content, keywords, and conversion opportunity.  If someone searches “green umbrellas” and you have a category page dedicated to green umbrellas, you’d want to choose that as your destination URL instead of the home page.

Device / Placement Management

Creating ads for specific device types is important for conversion rates. For example, people searching on mobile devices are more likely to click on ads with shorter, more direct content (obviously since they’re screens are smaller). Also keep in mind if you site is not mobile enables, driving traffic back to your site is probably not the best strategy. In fact, for mobile devices, you should probably have a separate campaign anyways (unless you’re opted into enhanced campaigns which is really a whole other story).

Writing ads based on where they are going to be positions is almost as important as what the ad actually says. Ads will look extremely different if they are placed in the top 3 positions vs. something lower. Similarly ads within content look less appealing if not written properly. Take a look at the differences in appearance. Keep this in mind when you’re writing your copy, and take note of the average position of your ads.