In my last post we talked about keywords for a PPC campaign. This time we’re going to talk about Advertising copy.

Your first step was to review keywords. Your second step is to review and create advertising copy.

Does your ad copy correlate to the keywords the user typed in? It should. Does your advertising copy repeat the keyword? It should. Your potential customer will have a better user experience on your site if your advertising copy mimics the search term they typed in. If you were searching for a product or service online, which types of advertising copy do you click on? The ones that might have something to do with what you are looking for or the ones that obviously say they have what you are looking for?

Advertising copy is hard to create. With only 70 characters, how do you get your potential customers to click on your ad instead of your competitors’ ad? Testing ad copy (see bonus tip below) and trying different messages to see which one works best for your goals is the way to go. To get started, look at your landing page and pull text from there. The landing page’s headline could be used, or perhaps one of your product’s listed features will fit in the 70 characters allowed. Not only will the landing page give you some ideas, but by using the same content in both the advertising text and the landing page, the customer experience is better (and so is your quality score!).

Bonus Tip: Include at least two different advertising texts in each ad group. You can see click-through rate (the ratio of impressions to clicks – one of the factors in your quality score) and potential conversion rate for each different ad, allowing you to find the wording that best suits your objectives.

Nicole Poole
Online Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software