When you ask a person studying to become an advertiser or a marketer what is the most important skill they think they possess that will enable them to “make it”, 90% will say “creativity”. Forget about the fact that this type of answer is not a very creative one in itself, it is not always the right answer either.
When you advertise online, sometimes there is not a lot of room for creativity.
How creative can you get with a maximum of 90 characters per Google text ad?
How will your ad stand out? — and yes, you will run out of characters extremely fast.
Check out our 5 tips for writing ads
Make a clear and concise promise
Sometimes, when you want to say so much about your product, you might push too hard and forget about the essentials. It is always better to be clear than to make cool, but ambiguous catch-phrases, at least on Google Search.
Here are some examples! There are two ads in the image for the same fictitious website. Which one do you find better?
As you can see, the first one is not focused at all. It just tells the brand name and insists on the fact that all customers are always happy and that summer offers are available. But the service in itself is ambiguous. There is mention of a trip so one can only suspect this is a travel agency but to where?
Do not assume everybody has heard of the “Carmonet” brand. User search queries are action-oriented and relevance oriented.
If someone is actively searching for a trip to Italy, the second ad will no doubt be more relevant. First off, it has the relevant keywords in the title and it gives some detail of the services offered.
Include a call to action in your text ad
What the above ad does well, on the other hand, is the use of a CTA (Call to Action): “book a trip now”.
It has been scientifically proved that including a CTA in your ad will increase the click rate on it. A study published in Marketing Science, in 2011, has data showing that the CTA increases click rates by 32,79%. This has been confirmed, with claims of even higher growth, by several private studies in the past few years.
- CTA’s you can use: “book now”, “buy now”, “get it now”, “register now” etc.
- CTA you can not use: “click here”
Use numbers and symbols in your text ad
Using numbers, prices and symbols in your ad also increase click rates. Wonder why?
Numbers and symbols tend to stand out of the monotony that text ads sometimes fall into.
But Google policies enforce a few rules that try to limit abusing this advantage. Therefore, using “gimmicky”, repetitive, improper writing techniques will lead to your ad becoming “disapproved”. Oh! And there are restrictions in terms of exclamation and question marks too! But you still have a lot of options: Some of them increase credibility: ®, ™, ©. Others will save you space and attract attention: &, €, £, %, 3* (for example to describe a 3-star hotel).
Please note also that improper use of upper-case letters is also forbidden — e.g. typing CARMONET or CARmoNeT is not allowed.
Place keywords in your Display URL
In the fictitious “Carmonet” example, you can see there is a web address under the headline. That one is called a Display URL and it is not the actual destination URL when you click the ad. It does not need to point to an actual page on your website. It is just the web domain that has to be yours. Extra tip: after the first “/” you can use the space to put in some keywords.
This will increase the quality of your ad — e.g. yourdomain.com/dresses/wedding
On the other hand, make sure your destination URL leads to the exact place on your website where you can find what you are advertising. Some enterprises point to their homepage, leading to an extra effort for the user searching for a specific product. So that is a “no-no!”.
Make use of the less-known “DKI”
Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) can help you deliver more customised messages to your users, synced with their queries (aka words used to search on Google).
I know! It sounds technical. But here is the stunning trick on this: when you are writing a headline for an ad, instead of “Shoes New York”, you may consider using DKI: “{Keyword:Shoes} New York”.
What this little trick does, is that it provides dynamic text, connected to what the users are looking for!
Here is how it works: let us say that you have running shoes, office shoes, comfortable shoes, affordable shoes, leather shoes as your keywords in the ad campaign. When the user queries match one of these keywords, the user sees a customised version of your ad — e.g. Someone looking for running shoes will see an ad with the headline “Running shoes New York”.
The obvious advantage is that a user who receives a search result in exact accordance to what he is searching for is much more likely to be interested, to click and, maybe, to buy. How awesome is that?!
But what happens if the search query is not in your keyword list? No worries! The default text, in our case“Shoes New York”, will be posted!
These are our top 5 tips for writing attractive text ads for Google Ads, but keep an eye on us for more and let us know which ones are you going to use!
Want to know more about improving your website content or traffic? Check out some great tools to use when you are editing your website content, learn what is pay per click or display/unrequested advertising and go through our comparison on SEO vs. Pay per Click Search Network!
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