6 Best Practices for Writing Great AdWords Ad Copy

Paid search engine marketing (SEM) should be a critical lever of your overall inbound marketing strategy. It can strongly complement your inbound marketing efforts by helping you to “get found” – the core mantra of inbound marketing – when the prospects are looking out for information. SEM gives you a chance to provide the most relevant information to your prospective customers when they need it the most.

No matter at what stage of buying journey your prospects are, you can build a relevant advert and improve your visibility on SERPs.

But you need to make sure that Google gives you a high Quality score, and this can happen only when your adverts are relevant to the keyword searches. Therefore, you need to write great AdWords ads and link them to relevant landing pages.

Writing great ads is also a critical element of optimizing your AdWords campaigns. So, here are six best practices to writing great Adwords copy.

1) Be relevant

Make sure that your ad copies are relevant to the keywords that you have bucketed for every ad group. For this, you need to ensure that your primary keywords are included in your text ad copies. To make the ad copies relevant further, you should take the semantic approach and try to include synonyms of the primary keywords in the ad description.

Here’s an example. For the search “camping tents”, notice that the ad on the first position has keywords both in headline and the description.

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2) Focus on benefits

While writing ad copies, you must focus on highlighting the benefits. Remember, people always like to come to you for your product or service only if they see the benefits. If you see in the example above, the Walmart’s ad clearly states the benefit – SAVE. Similarly, the ad on the third position also clearly highlights the benefit of saving up to 50%!

It is obvious that if you are searching for camping tents, odds are high that you have planned (or are planning) to go camping and therefore, would like to buy a camping tent; and who does not like the benefit of saving a few dollars?

3) Include a strong call-to-action

Always include a strong call-to-action (CTA). Having strong CTA encourages your viewers/prospects to click on your ad thereby improving your CTR (click through rate). Let us see another example below where you search for “sleeping bags”.

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Check out the ads on the right hand side panel. They have a strong call-to-action and encourage you to “Shop Now” and “Buy Sleeping Bags Now” because there is an offer of free shipping for a limited time period (benefit). These are strong, high quality ads since the advertisers are approaching you with relevancy, a benefit, and they encourage you to act now!

4) Use ad extensions

There are a lot of ways that you can use Ad Extensions feature. You can get a complete understanding of it here. But whatever type of Ad Extension you choose to use, you must ensure that you use it because it gives you more advertising space to make your ads more impactful. This helps to improve your visibility, which further improves the chances of viewers clicking your ad. As Google says, if two competing ads have the same bid and quality, the ad with greater expected impact from extensions will generally appear in a higher ad position than the other. All this happens at no extra cost to you.

Look at the example below. When I search for “Rent a RV”, I get ads with location extension. These ads are highly relevant and impactful for me because they also show me their locations, and therefore, compel me to click.

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5) Add dynamic texts to your ads

Instead of creating several static ad copies, Google provides you the option of creating text ads that automatically update with info you want potential customers to know. To use dynamic text in your text ad, type '{' in any new or existing text ad. Then select from a dropdown menu to select the type of dynamic text that you would want to add to your text ads. Here are full details about creating dynamic text ads.

6) Have more than one version of your ad copy

Once you set up your AdWords campaign, you need to monitor the data and see if you are happy with your KPI metrics such as conversion rate, CTR, etc. If you are not happy with the results, then you have to check if your ads need a fresh copy; or if you need a better landing page.

To perform this A/B testing, you should be ready with at least two versions of your ad copies. Having more than one version will help you improve your ads and optimize your campaign as well. Your ad versions should focus on changing one element at a time, so that when you run the A/B testing, you are able to gauge the results clearly. You will then know what is working, and what is not.

Do you have any best practices for writing great AdWords ad copy? Share it here in the comments section and have a wonderful day!