Writing the Perfect 3-Line Search Ad for Google, Yahoo!, & Others
When you’re writing ads for search engines like Google and Yahoo!, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that what’s in your ad isn’t terribly important. It’s just three lines. How important can it really be? Is one ad really going to outperform another, given that the main keyword appears in both? The answer is yes.
If you create multiple ad variations for a single ad group, and then analyze your ads over a long period of time, you’ll almost definitely find that certain ads outperform others. Google even has an ad optimizing feature that’s designed to detect those high-performing ads and show them more frequently. Of course, Google’s idea of good means a higher click-through rate, which may not always be the best indication of ad success.
A successful ad is one that does two things. It gets more clicks than the unsuccessful ads, and it brings in people who want what the advertised page has. Since the number of searches (your prospects) each month is limited, you obviously want to bring in the largest number of those people as possible. That’s easy enough.
On the other hand, if your ad is attracting people who aren’t actually interested in buying your product/reading your content, you’ve wasted your money. For that reason, a good ad may also need to add information to deter people who might not actually be interested.
To accomplish those goals, we should consider two basic types of ads - the keyword-heavy ad and the information-heavy ad. A keyword heavy ad operates off the idea that people are most responsive to ads that use the exact same words that they entered into the search engine. This becomes especially true when you consider that most search engines (including Google, Yahoo!, and MSN) will highlight any search results that include the original search term(s).
For example: You work for a company (let’s call it Xos) that sells contemporary desk clocks, and one of the searches you target is “modern desk clocks”. In that case, you might try running this ad:
When you design it, it will look like the above image. When it displays for potential customers who have searched “modern desk clocks”, all *3* instances of the phrase will become bold, making your ad stand out pretty noticeably. Below, another example of the keyword-stuffing concept:
Again, most of the ad will be highlighted when potential customers search “Velvet Toilet Seat Cover”.
There are two major downsides to this method. First, since there’s only room to use one major keyword, you’ll have to make ads for each of your keywords. While that’s generally good advice anyway, you may find that less restrictive ad copy would actually let you use each ad with several keywords. Of course, if you are bidding on a keywords that contain the same words (like “modern desk clocks” and “modern clocks”), you’ll find that all the searched terms that show up in your ad will be bold.
You may also notice that the text is not terribly informative. In some cases, the lack of information can hurt you, which is why I suggest testing this method alongside another method until you figure out which one works best for each ad group.
You should also try some more informative ads. In many cases, key product facts will help customers decide whether you have what they want without first clicking the ad. That may lower (or raise) your click-through-rate, but it should also result in a higher conversion rate for the people who DO click on your ad (in theory, anyway). Here’s an example for the desk clock scenario:
An ad like this one will most likely eliminate a lot of the people who are looking for a cheap desk clock, and it will draw in those who want, but had never considered the possibility of an XM-ready clock. Another example for the toilet seat cover situation:
If you give these two methods a try and tweak things until you get what works best for each ad group, you should have no trouble improving your overall return.