How To Write Pay Per Click Ad Copy

Get click through rates over 10, 20, even 30%.


Having excellent pay per click ad copy won't fix all the problems in a badly structured campaign (or save a business who's site doesn't convert) but it will go a long way towards improving campaign performance. And if your campaigns are even marginally successful, writing better ppc ad copy can generate major benefits.

Why? Better ad copy will increase your click-through rate, and thus get you more clicks. Beware, though - you only want more clicks if they convert. There are some ad copy tricks, like dynamic text, that can get you thousands more clicks an hour. The problem is, if those clicks aren't wooed by your landing page, you just paid hundreds, even thousands of dollars for clicks that don't convert.

The other major benefit to increasing click-through rate is how the Adwords system rewards high click-through rates. The price you pay for each click is determined by a formula that is basically:

max bid price set for the keyword x click through rate x quality score

This formula gives your ad and keyword a certain rank. That rank determines where your ad shows on the search results page (from position 1 all the way down to position 50 or more in some markets) and determines your actual spend on each click. Adwords is set to run a bit like an ebay auction, so you pay only one cent more than the competitor just below you.

Quality score applies to a variety of factors. Keywords, landing pages, sites and even ad copy are all rated with quality score by the Adwords system. These little vagaries in the formula have an affect, but its less of an influence than max bid and click through rate. This quality score was the cause of all the hub-bub a few summers ago when the "Google slap" hit. You don't usually pay exactly your max bid on each click.

Let's return to click through rate in terms of ad copy, and why its a good thing. A higher click through rate will not only get you more clicks, but it will get you cheaper clicks. If you ads' click through rate is 20%, and your competitor's is 5%, you'll spend significantly less money for each click than they do, assuming you're both competing for the same ad position.

So how do you get this high-ctr ad copy? One word: relevance.

Relevance is the same reason Google rewards high click through ad copy - the higher the click through rate, the more the ad obviously meets people's needs. So by rewarding high ctr ad copy, Google serves its visitors better, and makes significantly more money, because an ad that has a 20% ctr gets four times more clicks than an ad that has a 5% ctr.


#1 Way To Write Great PPC Adcopy: Create Narrowly-Defined Adgroups

Make sure all the keywords in each adgroup fit closely (even intimiately) with the ad copy.

This is one reason narrowly-defined ad groups work better than ad groups that have hundreds (even dozens) or unrelated keywords. The only ad that's going to address hundreds of keywords is going to be somewhat general. Specific ad copy performs better. This brings us to the second way to write a better ppc ad.


#2 Way To Write Great PPC Adcopy: Use Search Keywords

Put the search keyword in the title, in the body, and, if possible, in the display url of your ad. At the very least, put it in the title of the ad. This will immediately reinforce technique #1, and make have you breaking up your adgroups into smaller sets of keywords. A handful of your keywords may get enough impressions to even warrant their own adgroups (ie, one keyword per adgroup, and even one keyword match type per adgroup).

Getting this granular with keyword grouping has major benefits to both ad copy and quality score, but don't get too crazy with it. Every keyword in your adwords account doesn't deserve its own adgroup. Follow the 80/20 rule here or you'll spend your life managing your adwords account, with poor returns for both.

Google will also reward you for using search keywords in your ad copy: you get free bold in your ads when someone's search terms appear in your ad copy. The match has to be exact: a query for "lessons" will not highlight an ad that has "lesson" in the title. Also, only the matching keyword will be highlighted, not the whole ad.

You can add a keyword to your display url even if your website url doesn't use that keyword. Just pretend you have a directory with that keyword's name. For example, www.VenetianMasks.com/silk, would work for the search query "silk venetian masks".

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Pay Per Click Articles:
> Negative Keyword Lists: Why You Need Them
> How To Add Negative Keywords To Adwords, Yahoo and MSN adCenter Accounts
> Dynamic Text in Adwords Ads
> How To Sort Out Traffic From Google.com and Google's Search Partners