When writing Adwords ads, you have very little creative room to work with.  You have to make your point quickly within a tiny space.  Oh, and there’s a good chance there are other ads next to yours competing for audience attention.  Here are a few tips to help make your ads stand out and convert to sales better.

Ad text should reflect keyword phrases.
Text that is the same or very similar to the keyword phrase that has been entered into Google is highlighted within Adwords ad text. This makes the ad stand out more on the page, as you can see in our example.  This also makes ad bids cheaper due to increased relevance.

For example, if the ad group primary keyword phrase is “Toronto flowers,” you could include phrases like “Toronto fresh flowers” or “Toronto wedding fowers”, etc. The ad text would then always include the primary keyword phrase “Toronto flowers,” which would be highlighted no matter which keyword phrase in the ad group gets searched.

Test several versions of ad text.
By testing several versions of ad text, you’re not putting all your business’s eggs into one pay-per-click basket. It allows you to evaluate which ones perform best for your business. This allows you to test different selling points and wordings. You can then make modifications to the campaign after it’s been running awhile.

Differentiate from the competition.
Check out what your competition is doing for their ads on your chosen keywords phrases. This allows you to create ads with messages that stand out against the competition.

Use geo-targeted keyword phrases (when relevant).
With geo-targeted Adwords campaigns, we always use the targeted location in the ad text.   Even if the keyword phrase doesn’t include the location.  If a person is shopping around for a Toronto flower store, they will be more likely to click your ad if they see Toronto within the ad text.

These are only 4 Adwords ad writing tips, but if you implement them well, they bring about noticeable improvements to your ads’ conversion rates.

I was at the SES Toronto conference the other week, and a speaker went in front of the audience and showed his results for the search term “pink roses”. He went through all of the Google PPC ads for pink roses and noted that very very few of the sites that had PPC ads on the search term “pink roses” actually provided them on the ad’s landing page! We saw red roses, we saw white roses, sometimes we even saw orange roses, but pink roses were always a click away or more away. And this is the pink rose problem.

It got me thinking – are we really at a point, where someone can use Google as a universal interface to get whatever they want within one click? Maybe we are, since when there is no additional clicks, any good marketer knows that their conversions go up. Conversions go up, and cost per acquisition goes down. And everyone is happier.

One industry that has recently impressed me is the online rug selling industry. I recently was doing some searches on Persian Rugs, since we used to have a beautiful Persian in the house that I grew up in. I clicked on a landing page belonging to Rug Man and found the following display on the landing page:

It was amazing to see – that counter to what their competitors were doing (sending me to the homepage so I would have to root around the site myself to find the persians), they gave me the persian results right away.

I then executed searches on other rugs – and of course as a child of the 70s the shag was the first thing that came to mind. I found this landing page at Area Rug Universe:

Although Rug Man’s landing page was slightly more impressive, since it had a short introduction on persians before it went into the rugs, it is still great that I can type in what I am looking for and instantly get the results that I want – without learning about how to navigate a new site’s infrastructure to get started. This is straightforward to do from a technical perspective, since you can simply pre-fill the query for that ad in the search parameter. Which begs the question – why don’t more people, from more industries create lading pages liks this?

As more marketers wake up to the world of user behavior and provide them what they are looking for quickly, maybe we will get closer to that world where everything we want is available to us within one click. Because… the world definitely needs more pink roses.