Writing Killer Adwords Ads

If you’re looking for ways to get better returns from your Google Adwords campaigns without having to spend more money per click, it’s time to look in more detail at your ad copy. Having highly engaging and relevant ad copy will not only get your ad clicked on, it will improve its relevance with Google’s quality score. Your Adwords Quality Score is greatly influenced by your click through rates so the more effective your ad copy is, the greater the clicks through, the higher up the results you’ll move.

The first place to look for improvement is your title copy. The title or headline for your ad is the most important part of your ad as it’s the first thing people read. If you don’t grab them here the rest doesn’t matter. As little as 20% of people that read the ad titles will go on to read the ad descriptions, so you can see how important it is to get it right at the start.

The standard rule of title writing is to include the search keyword. This will be made bold in the results and without it your click through rates could suffer so try and work it in every time if you can. Beyond that simple rule here are a few ideas to make your title stand out from the crowd:

Draw them in with a story. You’ll have seen this method before used regularly in ads like, “how I lost 10 pounds without counting calories”

Get them curious with a question. An example of this method might be, “Want to find the best prices online?”

Offer to share privileged information. This can also be combined into a question, but discovering secrets is very appealing.

Give them clear instructions. This is generally associated with “How to…” titles.

There are lots more variations to consider later on, but start to play around with the idea of incorporating one or more of the above methods into your title copy and run a couple of test campaigns with just this change. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the results.

Once you’ve recreated your ad titles, it’s time to move on to the descriptions. Here there’s a lot more room to write and because there’s more room it’s all too easy to be more complacent about the words we use in these fields.

The main rule of thumb to follow when trying to write effective descriptions is to analyse word by word what can be construed by what you’re writing. Very small changes really can make a huge difference to the effective click through rate of your ad, so consider your words carefully.

Once you’ve got your title and description written you may well think that the job’s done and you’re ready to go. However, there are still a few more tweaks you can do in formatting to improve your chances further.

A nice simple formatting tip that can have a dramatic effect is to capitalise all the keywords in the ad, ignoring the connecting words, for example, “Free Widgets for Every Customer in London”. This simple exercise can nearly double effective click through on a like for like ad in lower case.

So try out a few of these techniques on your campaigns and see how they work for you. Remember though, every character counts so even when you think you’ve nailed it, there could still be more you can do to make your ads even better. Also, you might be interested to know, I've expanded on these ideas in an article called, Great Adwords Ad Copy Writing Tips on my personal blog.