In the previous blog post we continued our look at Google AdWords. We looked briefly at the subject of keywords and how they were pivotal to the success of your pay per click campaign and how selecting keywords that suit your business is an essential step.
This time we will be looking at the concept of ad text and how using it effectively can have a dramatic effect on the effectiveness of your campaign. You wouldn’t believe the seemingly small changes that you can make to ad text to improve the ads success.
One of the primary tips that people are given about ad text is to try if possible to use your keywords in the top line of the text. This is good for potential customers to see when they search – the text that they just searched for (as it is the keyword that triggered the ad) is shown back to the user. This increases the likelihood of them clicking on your advert. In addition this text will show in bold when the customer searches for it, further drawing attention to your advert.
The second line can be good place to really hook the viewer by mentioning some great selling point or reason for them to shop or click on your site. For sites selling directly to consumers this could be a promise of cheaper prices such as a percentage offer deal, or perhaps trying to temp the customer with a free postage offer. Either way the text should try and create a compelling reason for the viewer to click your advert.
The third line is normally a ‘call to action’, an authoritative instruction for the user to follow. An example of this might be “Don’t delay, order today!” Google AdWords won’t allow every type of ‘call to action’ though, text telling the user to “click here” will fail the ad text quality checking.
The final two lines relate to the URLs associated with the ad. The first is the display URL, it is the link that the viewer will see at the bottom of the ad. Depending on how lengthy your text for the rest of your ad has worked out it can be useful to include a shortened URL – without the ‘www’ or full directory path. The last line is the actual landing page URL, the ad viewer won’t see this link so its aesthetics don’t matter. It should however, always be pointed at the most relevant page on your site.
Martin Able is a web retail specialist working with payment gateways and cheque processing for ecommerce websites.
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