10 Key insights to writing an awesome ad copy

There are ads all around you. You step out and there are banners all around you, You watch TV in the comfort of your home or go out to watch a film or you are dining in a restaurant or you are browsing internet. Ads are everywhere.

If we talk only about online, ads are lifeline of internet.

We see hundreds if not thousands of ads per day in our day to day life. How many of those ads you remember among those?

Very few.

There may have been some that you saw that are still in the back of your mind.

Do you know why?

It is because those ads were able to connect with you. So let me share with you how you can make your ads stand out and create a lasting impression in the viewers mind.

1. Ad should connect with your target audience

According to me there are two types of ads.

• Business feature ads – Ads that speak about business and are focused towards feature of the product or service business is offering.
• Customer benefit ads – The ads are not from the business feature point of view but are from the customers benefit point of view.

Feature and benefits are one and the same thing but what feature is from a business perspective and benefit is what consumers get. So if you are selling dog food, you can opt to list features you offer as a business like free shipping, pay on delivery blah blah blah …

But you can also make an ad that list how the dogs can benefit from your product like be more energetic or dogs love your brand based on some survey and this will make your ads connect more with your audience.

2. Ad should convey the message

Ad should convey the message of what you are offering to your customer clearly. The above ad of Amazon does not tell anything about the product being sold i.e. dog food. I remember one ad which I saw recently about Murugappa Group which is a combined ad about lot of brands that Murugappa Group owns.

You can see the video ad here:

But then I could not understand what the ad is trying to convey. I could not remember a single brand in the ad that Murugappa Group owns nor did I understand what the Murugappa Group is all about.

If you ad is about brand awareness, make sure your ad creates an impression about the brand.

3. Keep ad groups small and highly relevant

Google Adwords wants ads for as many keywords as possible and so suggestions for keywords is everywhere in Adwords but if you tend to add too many keywords into an ad group, you tend to loose the focus of the ad group because some non-performing keywords can take up ad impression and reducing the CTR’s of the ads and ultimately ad rank for those ads. Once you have low CTR ads, your overall quality score for the performing keywords can also dampen.

So keep things highly relevant, try to keep Ad groups smaller with very few keywords and ads. I prefer ad groups with under 3 ads per group and only 10 keywords in each group. It helps me keep my ads very relevant to the keywords I am targeting and increase the overall Ad Rank, CTR as well as the quality score for keywords.

4. Write specific ads for specific keyword group

Ad copywriting is something that needs more attention than keyword research or writing the title of your blog post. People spend lot of time writing the perfect headline for the blog post or article or doing the keyword research but when it comes to writing the copy of the ad, they just tend to get anything that fits those character count.

Focus on writing specific ad for specific ad group and not just copying the ad from one ad group to other and change the keywords. Incorporate keyword into the ad copy as much as possible. It becomes that more easy if  you have smaller ad groups. I prefer to keep the keywords in the ad title only but then for long tail keywords, I use the description as well to insert the keywords into the ads.

5. Add keywords in display URL

Having as many keywords as possible in the ad helps. Keywords in title and description is pretty much the basic and goes without saying. So if you can find a place to add your keywords in the ad, do it. Display URL is one such location where you can drop your keywords and so don’t forget to add them in display URL.

6. Add ad copy keywords to landing pages

The ads aim is not to drive clicks from the user but once user click on the ads, he should not be stranded and the experience should be seamless and continuing. So try to keep the keywords on to the landing page. Your landing page copy should also focus on the keywords you are targeting.

The classic example could be we use Google organic search because Google delivers the best search results for what we are searching for or it is able to find the best landing page that has is optimized for those keywords. If your ads can provide a similar user experience, your ads will not only have a good lasting effect on user mind but this will also make better CTR and ultimately will broils down to ad rank and CTR and ultimately better quality score for keywords.

7. Call to Action and result based keywords in ads

There are certain keywords that are action based keywords like Book Now, Sign Up Today, Buy Now, Order Now, Check Us Out, etc. It makes people to take action on your ads but then there are certain keywords which sets the right user expectations to make those actionable item more actionable.

These actionable keywords make people understand instantly what they will get once they take the action. As an example we have 2 ad copies

1. Ad Copy 1 – Learn to Make Smarter Investments Decision. Sign Up Today
2. Ad Copy 2 – Make Smarter Investment Decision With Our ProductName. Sign Up Today

The “Learn to Make Smarter Investments Decision” is better than “Make Smarter Investment Decision With Our ProductName” because it is quite clear what he/she will achieve once he signs up which is, will be learning the process of making smarter investment decisions.

So not only you need to have clear call to action phrases but also make sure user knows what he can expect as a result of the action.

8. Price information in ads

If you are offering something for a price include the price in the ad and if it is for free, make sure you ad the word free in the ad. Free may increase the CTR of the ad but the price information will have a better effect on your conversion funnel. You may argue that putting the price information in ad may lower the CTR for the ad but if an ad with the price does not have a right kind of CTR, it means you are targeting the wrong keywords. The audience you are targeting with your keywords is not ready to purchase what you are willing to sale.

9. Experiment ads and keywords with search network only

Always work on campaigns via search network only as you are not able to track CTR of ads and keywords for display network. Once you are finalized with the ad and keywords, you can just replicate the group into another campaign for display network.

10. Dynamic keyword insertion

You can insert dynamic keywords into your ads using {keyword:KEYWORD}. It tells Google to insert the keyword user is searching for into the ad. Helps make your ads are highly related to the keyword being searched for but at times you may not see the right grammar and right capitalization in the ad.

Conclusion

Quality score is everything. After going through all these it trickles down to the old quality score of keyword. Quality score is everything but to achieve the higher quality score, it is not only the keyword that can do it for you and it has to be everything put into the right place to complete the puzzle.

Focus not only on keywords quality score alone but also on the ad’s ad rank. Higher ad rank means better CTR for keywords and better quality score. So instead of focusing more on finding the right keywords, try to focus more on the ads for those keywords.