How To Write Outstanding PPC Ads Text

Dinesh Thakur
9 min readApr 26, 2017

If you are well versed with PPC Marketing, you also would be knowing that PPC Ad copy plays a vital role in determining the success of any PPC campaign.

You have everything else set up perfectly like the structure of your campaigns, the ad groups, the targeting options and the best keywords.

But all this would go in vain if your PPC ad text is poorly written or constructed.

Sometimes advertisers get too involved in other elements like campaigns, keywords, Quality Score, Conversion Rate and doesn’t pay much attention in optimizing the ad copy.

However, writing compelling ad copy is not rocket science but it does involve certain creative efforts to write an ad copy that is persuasive and powerful.

Given below are 10 tips that would help you to write powerful and outstanding ad copy.

  1. Be Specific

Don’t make this mistake of writing very generic ad copies.

In order to deliver the right message to the right customer, you should try to be a specific as possible.

And as with PPC, you usually do not have enough space to write lengthy and descriptive messages in the PPC ads.

Basically, you are confined within a character limit and are expected to create compelling and persuasive ad copy while staying within the character limit.

So, when you are writing your PPC ads, be concise and to the point.

Clearly state why the customers should choose you over your competitors and do not forget to include your Unique Selling Proposition in your Ad Copy to make it more persuasive.

2. Be Relevant

It is essentially important to ensure that you align all your ads with their respective keywords and landing pages.

Avoid all the unnecessary words and include only words that add value to your product or service.

While setting up your PPC advertising campaigns and ad groups, ensure that your campaign structure is set up in an optimized way so as to make the ads more relevant.

If your ads contain keywords that matches the search query of the users, those keywords in the ad will appear in bold letters and will indicate the relevance of your ad with the user’s intent.

The more your ads are relevant, the more will be the Click Through Rate and the Quality Score and the Cost-per-Click will reduce.

On the whole, more clicks and conversions for you while paying less for every click.

3. Create Attention Grabbing Headline

There is a very high level of competition in the PPC space where almost everyone is trying to grab the undivided attention of the users.

The visitors today are in so much of hurry that they just scan through the website or search results.

In such a situation, how are you going to make people pay attention to your PPC ads?

For this very reason, it becomes really important to create headlines of the ads that are both compelling and attention grabbing and also that makes you different from your competitors.

In your headline, it is always better to show the benefits and not the features because the users are not interested in what you do instead they want to know what your product or service can do for them.

Or how can your product or service help them to achieve a desired level of satisfaction?

Include keywords in your headline that are associated with your product/service.

By using the currently trending keywords, you can increase the chances of your ad being seen and can also increase the CTR.

While creating headlines, target the emotions of the users because emotional connection drives interest.

4. Highlight Your Unique Selling Proposition

To explain the users how different you are from your competitors or what makes your product or service unique or what benefit your customer will get after buying your product or service, you need a Unique Selling Proposition.

In your ad copy, you must highlight your Unique Selling Proposition.

It must be something that your competitors do not offer because only then you will stand out from your competitors.

Make sure that your USP is unique and relates directly to your customers.

Sometimes it becomes very difficult to incorporate whole of your USP in the ad text owing to the character limit.

To solve this problem, create short and creative text phrases that includes the benefits of your products and services and at the same time differentiates you from your competitors.

5. Include A Compelling Call-To-Action

The first line of your ad text is the headline while the last one should be the Call-to-Action.

A Call-to-Action is the final opportunity to close the deal for your business and convince the customers to click on the ad to visit your website.

Having a good Call-to-Action not only increases your CTR but also increases the effectiveness of your PPC Campaigns.

While creating a Call-to-Action make your intentions perfectly clear to your prospective customers.

Avoid the use of general phrases like “Click Here” as the visitor already knows to that he has to click on the link.

Instead, use phrases that describe that why the users should click on the link and what will be the end result of clicking the link.

A great is just like your sales pitch and when written correctly tells the customers what to expect when they reach the landing page.

Some examples of great CTAs are:

  • Direct Answer: Call, Download, Register, Purchase.
  • Lead Generation: Start, Contact Us, Fill The Form, Enroll.
  • Engagement: Watch, View, Reach Discover.

6. Use The Display URL Of PPC Ads

The display URL is often an overlooked part of the PPC ads.

Your Display URL should be relevant and specific too because it is a part of your PPC ads.

Try to get most from your display URL as optimum use of display URL is a great way to enhance the CTR.

As your display URL shares the same domain name as your destination URL, hence there is no valid point that you can not display this URL as a part of your ad text.

You can repeat the primary keyword at the end of the end of the URL by simply putting a (/).

This gives the searcher an impression that the ad bears relevance to the searcher’s query.

The keyword in the display URL that matches the searcher’s query is displayed in bold by Google and this makes the keyword stand out from the ordinary text.

7. Test The Various Elements Of Your PPC Ads

Testing the different elements is the key to determine the PPC conversion success.

To ensure which of your ads are going to perform the best, you need to conduct A/B of the ads.

Test different versions of your ads so that you consistently refine them on the basis of conversions.

Also in order to achieve a very good CTR and a positive ROI, you need to test your ads continuously.

Even if your ads perform outstandingly in the first go, there is always room for improvement so you should test the top performing ads as well.

Also by testing different Call-to-Actions, you can determine which Call-to-Action resonates with your potential customers and is a solution to their pain points.

There are a lot of elements to test within a PPC ad like the headline, Call-to-Action, offer, display URL, Punctuations, keywords etc.

8. Stand Out From Your Competitors

Create absolutely distinct ads that make you stand out from your competitors.

Conduct proper competitor analysis to see the headline, ad description, display URL, Call-to-Action and keyword of your competitors.

Also, analyze which of your competitor is bidding for your target terms.

Before starting to write the PPC ads, you should always research and note what your competitors are doing.

By identified the what points are being highlighted and what is being offered by your competitors, you can easily find out what makes you different from your competitors or better at competition.

You can also include the advantages of your products and services in your ads stand out among the competition.

9. Use Power Words and Trigger Emotionally

There are a lot of words in the vocabulary but certain words are more powerful than the rest.

Why?

Because they have the power to convey the right messages and they have found to be most effective in persuading and convincing their audience to engage with their business.

Image Source: Google Search

By using these words in your Ad copy you can easily influence the visitors to click on your ads thereby increasing your CTR.

In one of her blog posts, Henneke has given a detailed description of Power Words.

Although the list of the power words are quite long but you can use the following power words to enhance your ad copy: New, Free, Imagine, Because, Instant, How To and You.

Along with the usage of Power Words, you can also use the emotion factor in your Ad Copy to connect with your customers.

To create emotional ads, you need to first understand the people who are behind the search queries.

You need to find out who is your potential customer and what buyer persona do you want to serve.

After that write emotionally charged ads from the viewpoint of the chosen buyer persona.

The emotional ads perform well because they somehow directly connect with the visitor on a personal level and the visitor feels that the particular ad was actually created to solve his problem.

10. Correlate Ads With The Landing Page

A well-written Ad Copy will only work when it is aligned with its relevant landing page.

Image Source: Flipkart

A lot of times the advertisers forget what is being offered on the landing page and write the Ad Copy out of their imagination and creativity.

No matter how compelling your Ad Copy is but if it is not aligned with the relevant landing page, you may face a reduction in the CTR.

Just imagine your customer gets really impressed with your ad copy and clicks on it. After landing on the landing page he notices stuff that is very different from that of the ad copy.

After being not satisfied, he bounces back.

Therefore, you need to correlate your Ad Copy with the landing page because both are complementary to each other.

You can highlight the USP and benefits on your landing page that you included in your Ad Copy.

By this, the customer will easily get to see the highlighted content that was promised in the Ad Copy.

Conclusion

In PPC ads, you are bound by character limit and so there is no space for exaggerating anything.

You have to cut the unnecessary stuff and make every single character worthy enough to get clicks.

Be super relevant and specific when it comes to creating PPC Ads.

There is always room for improvement of PPC ads

PPC ads become successful only after comprehensive testing.

Hence, keep testing your ads and landing page so as to develop a winning PPC Campaign.

PPC ads are your first impression to your visitors and you should make it a point to make the impression perfect.

Hopefully, these tips have provided you better insights to create outstanding PPC Ad Copy.

Nevertheless, PPC ads are just like PPC campaigns. They are never ending. You just need to optimize and test it from time to time.

About Author: Dinesh Thakur is the Co-Founder of Pathvisit which an all-in-one marketing tool for conversion tracking, callback generation & reporting.

Pathvsit helps you to track website phone calls, convert more visitors, and create marketing reports in one unified platform.

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