7 Tips for Creating Effective PPC Ads

1.  Work on writing good headlines.

You only have room for a few words in your headline (25 characters!), so every single word has to count!   The best place to start when you sit down to write your headlines is with your keywords or problem statements.  For example, say you sell an ebook about training puppies.  One headline option could be “How to Train a Puppy.”

There’s nothing wrong, per se, with this headline.  It definitely relates to a specific problem statement.  It can be improved, however.  Here are four techniques you can use with your keywords to bring your headline up to the next level:

1. Highlight your main benefit.  For example, if your ebook can teach someone how to train their puppy in five days, then that would be a great benefit to showcase.  Your headline could change to something like, “Train a Puppy in 5 Days,” or “Fast Puppy Training.”
2. Paint a picture of the problem statement.  For example, your headline could read, “Stop Puppy Barking.”
3. Target a specific market.  While your PPC ad should already do this anyway, it’s important that your headline identifies exactly who you are targeting.  This will help make sure that only potential customers click on your ad so that you don’t waste money on worthless clicks.  So, your headline could say something specific like “Boxer Puppy Training,” or “Puppy Paper Training.”  These would target specific types of puppy owners.
4. Add attention-grabbing words.  Words like free, instant, now, bonus, order now, get yours, call now, and limited offer are great at making your headline jump out at people.

Try writing out a few sentences that summarize your main benefit or the main problem you are addressing.  Next, eliminate words in each sentence until you’ve reduced your sentences down to the bare minimum.   Think of your ad as a teaser whose sole purpose is to get the right people to click through to your website, where you can go into more detail.

2.  Stick to the point.

You only have 70 characters worth of space for your ad’s text, which isn’t a lot of room to work with.   This means you need to concentrate on only including the most important information and benefits of your product or service in the ad in order to get the most out of the space you are allotted.   Start by writing a couple of sentences that include the main benefits and selling points of your product or service, and then prune out all of the unnecessary words and less important benefits until all you have left is a brief, benefit-rich description.

3.  Write for a specific audience and solve a specific problem.

Every time someone clicks on your ad you will be charged, so you want to ensure that the people who click through are people who will be the most likely to take the action you want (like buying your product or opting in to your list).   The bottom line is that your product or service won’t appeal to everyone, no matter what you do.

A lot of marketers make the mistake of trying to promote their product to everyone, and all this does is reduce the number of sales that they get.  You get more sales by marketing to a highly targeted group of people than you do by trying to market to everyone.  Marketing to a targeted group of people will also earn you a higher quality score on Google, which will result in higher rankings.

4.  Showcase benefits, not features.

Your target market isn’t necessarily interested in what your product is as much as they are interested in what it can do for them.   When you write your PPC ads, you should always be thinking about trying to answer your customers’ biggest question:  “What’s in it for me and how can I benefit from buying this?”   While you are thinking about your product’s benefits, you should also be concentrating on its USP (unique selling proposition).  Your USP is what makes your product different from the competition’s.  You can increase your clickthrough rate by emphasizing the points that make you unique.

5.  Use your keywords.

If you want your ad to get good results, then it needs to include the keyword that it was build around.   In the best case scenario, you would want to put your keyword in each of the three elements of your ad:  the headline, the ad text, and the domain name.   It’s important for you to match the language that your target audience uses in your ads.  If you use the right jargon for the right potential customers, you can increase the impact of your ad.

While you can’t format your PPC ads, you can get search engines to do it for you.  For example, most of them will bold the keywords.  If you want your ad to jump out at people, use your keyword in the title and description.  You can benefit in two ways from doing this:

1. The bolded keywords will appear twice in your ad, and
2. Customers will zero in on exactly the terms they are searching on.

Of course, though, there are exceptions to every rule.  You should always monitor your competition and analyze their ads.  Do all of your competitors use the keyword in their titles and descriptions?  If they do, then you doing the same might make your ad blend in more than it stands out.  In this situation, you would be better off using one or two words out of the phrase you were bidding on.  This is also a good strategy when the keywords you want to use are just too long.

6.  Include a compelling, specific call to action.

Read over your ad and ask yourself what your customers are asking, “Why should I click on this ad right now?”  You need to create a sense of urgency in your ad by talking about limited-time or limited-supply offers, or the promise of instant gratification.   The most effective way you can do this is to use power-words, like we used earlier when we were writing headlines—words like buy, get your, and sign up.

Also, you need to tell your target audience exactly what you want them to do with a specific call to action, such as…

• Sign up now for Free membership.
• Save now on [your product].
• Get [your product] cheap.
• Register now and save 20%.

…rather than general phrases such as:

• Click here.
• Visit our site.
• Look here.
• Come see.

These general phrases don’t tell potential customers anything about your website or give them any useful information at all.  Your call to action needs to tell customers what they are going to get if they act now.   Think about what phase of the buying process your potential customer is at and use words that fit.  For example, is your potential customer still looking for information, or are they ready to buy?  Your call to action needs to match the phase your target customer is at.  If your potential customer is still gathering information, you should use words like find, search, review, and guide, and then direct them to a landing page that matches their search.

7.  Create specific landing pages.

So now you are attracting clickthroughs with your specific keywords, but you need to pay attention to what your clickthroughs will see when they get to your landing page.  The information you provide on your landing page needs to match the exact information your visitors clicked on your PPC ad to find.  For example, if your PPC ad talks about puppy training but your landing page sells leashes and dog bowls, people won’t take the extra time to try and find what they were looking for, they’ll just go somewhere else.  The worst part is that you will have paid for a worthless click.

You need to let your target customers know exactly what they will be expected to do when they click on your ad and are directed to your landing page.   Your landing page should follow up on whatever you promised in your ad, or you will lose credibility and your visitors won’t turn into customers.

And remember, you should leave out unnecessary information from your ad, like:

• Exclamation points.
• Multiple question marks.
• Repeated keywords.

You can find a detailed list of the dos and don’ts of creating PPC ads for most search engines at https://adwords.google.com/select/guidelines.html.