‘Ad creatives’ are the text that makes up the body of your ad. Here, our Paid Search experts offer their advice on optimising your creatives to drive the best results.
There are three distinct elements to ad creatives – the headline, two description lines and a display URL.
The character limits for each element are as follows:
The display URL is a substitute for the landing page’s real URL, which will likely be too long to display within the ad. The display URL helps users understand where they’ll land when they click the ad.
Ad creatives are also called ‘ad text’.
Your ad creatives could be your first contact with your audience. It needs to grab people’s attention immediately – and it needs to do this in a highly competitive space.
Your first step is to find ad text that isn’t working. Check to see which ads have a low click-through rate – if you can’t identify any issues with keyword relevancy or the position of the ad, then the ad creative might be the problem.
Here are some quick tips to help you fix it…
Include keyword content. When users see a keyword in your headline, it demonstrates that your ad is relevant to their search query – and this is relevant to their needs. Dynamic keyword insertion can be useful for this.
Highlight USPS and promotions. Search is a competitive space, and you don’t have much space to make an impression! Make sure your description lines include the unique selling points that make you competitive – as well as highlighting the awesome offers and time-limited promotions that attract clicks.
Include a call to action. Don’t be afraid to tell your customers want you want them to do. A strong call-to-action like ‘purchase’, ‘call now’ or ‘sign up’ can work wonders on your click-through rate and conversions.
Display clearly to the user where their click will take them. The text in your display URL has to be the same domain as your landing page URL, but you can tailor after \ to show that your offer is relevant to users’ needs.
A good display URL can have surprisingly positive effects on your ad’s click-through rate and conversion rate. It also affects Quality Score, so can help to reduce CPCs or make your ad appear in a better position.
And the most important tip of all:
Google recommends that you use up to three ads per ad group as a minimum. This is because you can never know for sure if one message will appeal to all customers.
By rotating between three pieces of ad text, you might find that one message drives more clicks than the other. By switching the ad rotation settings to optimise for clicks, this ad will get served to customers more often.
Think of your ads as your shop front. You’d regularly redress a shop window to drive more footfall. PPC ads are no different.
This post is adapted and abridged from our FREE eBook – The Best-Practice Guide to AdWords Audits: Part One.
Download your copy now to learn best practice recommendations to help you audit your AdWords account.