Sunday, May 18, 2008

AdWords Ad Text

AdWords gives you 25 characters for your Headline and 25 characters for your next two lines of description.

Some Tips:

1 – Write your ads in a word processor first so you can spell check them.
2 – If you use any of the words that are used by the searcher, those words will show up in bold in your Sponsored Link when it is displayed.

The AdWords link can only go to one page. Think about what that page is about when writing your ad.

Your ad should never be misleading. There are two reasons for that. The first is ethical, the second is selfish.

Ethically, if you mislead people with your ad they will not trust your pages or you.

Selfishly, you are paying every time someone clicks on your ad. If you mislead them they are not likely to stay on your page or end up doing business with you.

Tip: If you say in your ad you are offering something for free you absolutely need to have that free offer deliverable on your page. The Sponsored Search companies are very sensitive to this. They will check your page and close you down if you mislead with free offers.

Use of words like “best”, “leading”, “cheapest” are not allowed. The automated editors that review your ad will tell you this and not allow them to be published.

An example of a possibly good ad if you are selling workers compensation insurance in Raleigh, NC might be….

Workers Comp Insurance
Get free online quote for workers
compensation insurance. Raleigh, NC

That is 22/33/35 characters. It will have the words workers, comp, insurance, Raleigh, and NC in bold if they are part of the search.

Here is the unfortunate truth about what makes a good AdWords ad. I never know in advance. Neither will you. Every time I think I have a great idea, I put it online and measure the results and I am wrong. Then I will try something I think is just stupid and it will have great results.

The good news is that AdWords lets you run multiple ads at the same time. They then let you see the results of which ads had better click through rates.

Your job is to keep tinkering with things and reviewing the results every day. You will find by trial and error what actually works best for you. In my experience a change of just one word can double your click through rate. You just have to find that one word. You can find that one word by testing and measuring the results.

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