5 components of a great PPC advert
With 25 characters in the title and 35 characters per line in the body, getting across your marketing message in a search engine pay per click advert is a challenge, especially if you take in to account you will be competing with 10 organic results and 9 other paid results for the searcher’s attention.
Below is a dummy advert for an online sports store bidding on the keyword “trainers”
Trainers sale ends soon
Trainers up to 40% off top brands
Hurry ends soon. Free delivery
www.super-sport-shop.com/trainers
1. Use of the keyword in the advert
When a keyword appears in a PPC advert it is highlighted bold which makes your advert stand out and confirms to the searcher your advert is relevant to their search.
2. The keyword at the start of the title and body
When you look at a search engine results page you don’t read each entry and then make a considered decision. Rather you skim the page looking for visual cues as to which result answers your query best. Research is showing that if they don’t get a cue within the first few characters they will look elsewhere.
3. Stand out from the crowd
What are you marketing that makes people want it? Here we have a sale, so we lead with the biggest percentage discount we have. If you have a low cost product lead with the price, if you have a new product; emphasise that and so on.
4. A call to action
Why should someone click on the advert now rather than come back later? In this case we are saying to benefit from the 40% off they need to act soon or they will miss out. Avoid using “Buy now! or “click here!”, those are tired versions and people are blind to them now.
5. The keyword in the URL
A PPC advert has two URLs. The visible URL is what people see, and the second is where it actually goes which is not seen by the searcher and the two do not have to be exactly the same. Your visible URL has to be the site where the ad takes them, e.g. if you display www.super-sport-shop.com it can’t take them to www.super-free-drugs.com. However, you can tailor the visible URL. In the advert above the site does not have a page titled ‘trainers’ instead the actual URL is www.super-sport-shop.com/footwear/. However, in order to make the advert stand out more ‘footwear’ has been replaced by ‘trainers’.
On April 14th, 2008 at 10:18 am
Yes it is a good article.
On April 16th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
There is another tip which is to capitalize the first letter of every word in your title. Apparently increases your click through rate. I must say, it worked well for me
On April 17th, 2008 at 10:57 am
The capitalisation thing’s interesting. As a copywriter, I generally use sentence case (just capitalising the first letter of the first word) for headings, because it makes the words easier to skim and is easier on the eye as well!
However, I guess in the PPC situation, where you’re in competition with others, it can help you stand out. (The flipside being that if everyone started doing it, then it would lose its impact.)