One of the best things you can do to really kick butt with AdWords is to understand that managing your PPC campaign is a step by step process with each step designed to accomplish a specific objective, and with all steps linked, leading your prospect from the start (where they search for the key terms you’re bidding on) to the end (where they ‘convert’ either into buyers or leads or subscribers).
Note: What I’ve found is that when I break down AdWords (or keyword research, or SEO, or sales writing basically, any skill) into small steps like this, people instantly find it a lot easier to understand what’s going on. I’m hoping that you’ll find the same thing with today’s chapter on ad writing.
Writing ads, then, is just one step of this process. But before we dive into the specifics, I want to discuss something that is at the heart of any successful Google AdWords campaign:
Focused Keyword Lists
If you remember from the previous chapter on keyword research, you will remember that it is absolutely critical that you break down your main keyword lists into smaller lists that are focused around subtopics. If your ads are not targeted to your keywords (i.e. general-purpose ad on insurance showing up for someone who is searching for car insurance) they might not click on your ads. Worse, if your site does not offer a particular type of product (you are targeting custom home theater systems when you don’t offer any customization), all those clicks will be wasted.
And that’s the single biggest problem with most AdWords campaigns -a lack of focus.
Start off with a basic list, and then expand it into specific subtopic lists as you refine your campaign. One of the ways to do this is the ‘Peel and Stick’ method.
Ok then, on to writing ads.
Ad Writing Basics
Before you write an ad, you have to remember that in even a low-competition market, your ads are under pressure to perform (that is, your clicks must also convert), or otherwise they will end up costing you money. Because of this you should always write ads with two things in mind:
• The ad must persuade the prospect that the page this ad points to will hold the answer to what they are looking for.
• The landing page must deliver on what the ad promises, otherwise the clicks will be wasted.
In addition, you also have to ensure that only those people whom you are targeting will click on your ad. Or to put it differently, you want to make sure that you get the clicks that are most likely to convert into buyers.
Now that we know what’s required, we can map out some guidelines for writing the ad.
Identify what you are selling
Make sure you have a clear idea of what you’re selling and how that will tie in with your ad. Choose the keywords that apply to your site, and include them in your ads.
Narrow down your target market
Understand who you are selling to. An excellent example of this is one of Perry Marshall’s recent ads for his book, Guide to Google AdWords. He’s targeting serious business minded people who are willing to pay for quality products, so he’s made sure that he lists the product price in the ad. Does that help? It will potentially keep out people who are looking for free advice or those who cannot afford the book.
Refine the focus of your market by writing down who exactly you are selling to. For my weight loss e-book, I focused on young adults who led extremely busy lives and wanted an easy, effective and time-saving solution to managing their weight problems.
Use focused keywords to help you create a targeted ad
Focus on subtopics rather than ads for the general keyword – they convert much better into customers because you are able to direct them to exactly that page containing the information they are looking for.
Write to persuade…. this is sales writing in a very small space
Sales writing boils down to a simple principle convincing the reader to take immediate action on what the writer wants them to do (sign up to a list, buy a product, etc). To do this right, you have to first attract their attention (headline), convey the most powerful benefit (first line) and provide a logical justification for taking that action through your most powerful feature (second line).
Your Template for Writing Successful Ads
There are three very important concepts on writing successful ads:
• Targeted keyword list
• Focused ads
• Quality salesmanship
As we breakdown the ad template into 5 separate components, keep these three concepts in mind and see how you can use them to help you write better ads.
Headline
Your headline’s main purpose is to attract attention of your target market. By wording it correctly you can avoid “curiosity” clicks, but the best part is that when you start targeting specific keyword sets (subtopics instead of general terms), you can use the headline to target your specific market and thus gain a considerable edge over competitors who are not using targeted keyword lists.
Whenever possible, use your main search terms for that ad group in the headline. The reason for this is that whenever terms in your ad match the searched keywords, they are put in bold by Google. This way your ad automatically attracts more attention. This works better with low-competition terms than for main keywords (where everyone has put the keywords into their headline).
First Line
This is not a “hard and fast” rule, but it has been proven to work effectively. There are two kinds of reasons you can provide a prospect to get them to click onto your ad benefits and features. The first is an emotional, psychological argument, where as the second one is factual and logical.
And when it comes to salesmanship, emotional arguments work much better than factual arguments (possibly because facts can be countered by other facts, but emotions are a difficult breed to beat).
But you cannot survive without having both. That’s why you have to find a way to fit them both into the 2 lines you have (70 characters in total).
Stick your biggest, most powerful benefit in the first line. In the ad example down below, the benefit is expert help on how to set up home theater systems. This plays on the idea that anyone looking to make such a huge expense would want to seriously research the market and would welcome advice over a sales pitch. No matter what your level of knowledge, the chance to get input from an expert (in this case, free advice) is hard to pass up.
Your benefit will be your best guess on what people are looking for when they search on your main keywords. For a high-value item like home theater system, people tend to shop around before buying, so you want to pull them in with an informational benefit.
Second Line
Put your most important feature in the second line. In this case, it is a free report available for immediate download. In this case, anyone reading that ad knows that the report is short to read (24 pages) and that they can start reading it within minutes.
In other words, expert advice, in your hands, within minutes. That’s what this ad is selling. Your feature will be a specific offering that matches your previously stated benefit most closely.
This shows the site’s URL, it’s simple enough to put your main site URL in this line, but by being creative, you can use this space to give ‘extra space’ to the stated benefit or feature.
Display URL
In our example, the display URL points to the “free guide” but if I were writing it differently, I could also change it to “experts corner”, or something else that emphasized the benefit of the ad. Use every little space of the ad that you can. You don’t have much of it to start with as it is.
The second line is the actual URL where the prospect will be redirected to. Don’t send your traffic to the main page for each type of ad, you’re targeting a different section of the market. Make sure you send them to specially targeted pages (in this case, the download page for the free report).
Destination URL
If you are sending traffic directly to an affiliate’s site, the destination URL would your affiliate page, whereas the display URL could be the main address of that site.
Click-through-rate positioning
One of the most important numbers in your Ad stats is the click-through-rate (CTR). This is one of the major factors that determines the quality score of each keyword, which in turn determines (along with other factors such as bid pricing) the positioning of your ad.
What that means is if you have a high CTR for your ads, you may be able to get your ad in a higher position than a competitor who is bidding more than you, but has a lower CTR. You can, effectively, rank higher than your competition but spend less to get there just by improving your CTR. In competitive markets, this is an edge you should always be fighting for.
Split Testing
A proven system for constantly improving your CTR is to use a method where you run two alternating ads and after a certain number of clicks (enough to prove that one ad is going to perform better than the other) you discard the ad with the lower CTR and write a new one (making only marginal changes) to try and beat the better-performing ad.
You should ideally repeat this process all the time, right from the start of an ad campaign. Write two ads, run them to get enough clicks, establish which ad is the ‘control’ (one that performs best) and then try to “beat the control” by writing better ads.
You shouldn’t be changing too much of the ad during split-testing, the purpose is to change around certain sections of your ad and see how small changes can make a difference. Making small changes also allows you to pinpoint the exact change that causes an improvement in CTR, and if you can figure out what takes your CTR higher and what brings it down, you can essentially write class ads from the word go.
How to do Split Testing in AdWords
For each ad group, make sure that you’re running two ads at the same time. Google will alternate between your ads for that group, and once you have enough clicks (30 is a good number) for each ad, you can determine effectively that the current CTRs of both ads will remain relatively the same (for very close CTRs, you might want to let them run a bit longer).
How did we reach the number ’30 clicks’? It has to do with statistics and confidence levels…let’s just say that it’s not an arbitrary number but in fact a scientific estimate. There’s an excellent online tool that helps in all this intuitively, it’s named Split Tester.
Split testing is a must if you want to continue improving your CTR. The goal here is not to make rapid changes, but small measurable ones so that you can figure out which change causes improvements and which change causes a decrease in CTR. This way, you will soon be able to determine what type of ads work best in your niche and thus create effective, compelling ads.
Bad Ads, Good Ads
When we talk about good and bad ads, we are also talking about:
• the keywords that those ads are targeting
• the landing page of that ad
A bad ad will be unfocused, using a general keyword list and will probably send traffic to the site’s main page. This will first of all hurt the advertiser’s CTR, and worse, it will hurt their conversions as well.
And in competitive markets, that means that you will be losing money badly.
Here’s an example of a poorly optimized ad (I’m going with a different niche here – insurance):
.. and they’ll use the following keywords for this ad.
• auto insurance quote
• auto insurance rate
• affordable insurance rates
• affordable insurance
• auto insurance online
• health insurance
• California health insurance quote
• California health insurance plan
Then what they’ll do is they’ll send their visitors directly to their homepage, no matter what keyword the visitor had searched for in Google, to find their ad.
If we created a little organizational chart of their campaign, it would follow this path:
What’s wrong with this? Well, there are several things that are MAJORLY wrong with this campaign. Let’s list them below:
1. They’ve placed ALL of their keywords into 1 single Ad group. You should place only “similar phrases” into their own separate Ad groups.
2. The headline of their ad is horrible: a team financial.
Really… I’m assuming A Team Financial is the name of their company? I really don’t know… They SHOULD have included the main keyword in the title of their ad.
3. Their ad description talks about what “their” passion is. People don’t care about what the company’s passion is. The ad should talk about the customer. What’s in it for me?
4. Their ad takes visitors directly to their homepage, for all of their keywords. Each keyword “group” should take visitors to an individual web page designed specifically around that keyword phrase.
Now – Here is how they should have structured their Ad words campaign:
Alright, now what they should have done is grouped their keywords into the following different Adwords groups:
Once they’ve done this, they could write 2 different ads for each of these 3 Adwords groups. The ads would be written to target the main 3 keywords: auto insurance, affordable insurance, and health insurance.
Here’s an example of 2 much better written ads for the newly created ad group, health insurance.
What I’ve done…
• Added keyword to the headline
• First line of description contains a benefit. Tells the visitor “what’s in it for them”
• Second line of description contains a feature
• All words have been capitalized
URL has part of the main keyword as a subdirectory.
In ad #2 I’ve done the same thing as ad #1, but I’ve changed the URL by adding a more specific subdirectory.
It’s always best to split test 2 ads to see which will give you the highest clickthrough rate. The higher your clickthrough rate, the less you’ll pay Google.
So, that’s the basics of splitting your keywords up into targeted groups, so you can write specific ads based on the EXACT keyword phrases that people are searching for. Make sense?
To get high CTR and high conversions, you have to focus on targeting keyword sets, not a generalised list. In addition, you have to write as a salesperson which means following the process that I’ve detailed in this chapter.
Trick #3
Let’s do a quick example so I can show you how I use Keyword Elite to separate my keywords into their own Adwords groups.
Step 1: Open up and run project 1 “create a keyword list”. We’ll enter the keyword “insurance”. Under step 3 we’ll select “Overture”. And under step 4 we’ll tell Keyword Elite that we want 400 keywords related to the word “insurance”. We could choose more, but for this example, let’s just go with 400. Then click ok.
Step 2: Keyword Elite will begin to gather keywords for us, related to the keyword insurance. Once it’s finished processing, we’ll highlight all of the keywords. Then “rightclick” out mouse and select the option titled “Export as groups to TXT”.
What this will do is it will automatically separate all of our keywords into their own Adwords groups for us! It will create 1 text file for each group. So, all we’ll need to do is open up each text file and paste our keywords into our Adwords account and we’re all set. It can’t get much easier that that
The text files for our “insurance example” will look like this:
And, for example, the “life insurance” group would contain these keywords:
You’ll notice that all the keywords contain the word “life insurance”, so you could write one ad based on “life insurance”. If you wanted, you could also take one of these keyword phrases and then use Keyword Elite to create a brand new keyword list based on one of the keywords from this file. This would then give you an even more specific list of keywords, which you could then break down into smaller ad groups …This is a real time saver for me.
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