The Art of Writing Enticing AdWords Adverts

Google AdWords can be a minefield for those who are unsure what they are doing. I hear stories of people who have set up an AdWords Account, left it to run and come back a couple of months later to discover they have lost £500 with no return. My advice is never to create an account without some form of help and advice from an accredited AdWords Professional, at least in the early days. We are going to look at the most important area of AdWords - creating the adverts themselves.

 There is an art to creating effective AdWords adverts. In my opinion the business owner generally creates more effective adverts than an AdWords agency will, which is why I believe in training business owners to create their own adverts. I believe this is due to the fact the business owners naturally understand their own product and market better than the agency. Creating AdWords adverts takes time to perfect, and you should ideally be reviewing your existing adverts and subsequently creating new adverts on a monthly basis. You will find that your skills improve over time, as will your Click Through Rate(CTR) - which is the percentage of people viewing your advert that choose to click it and visit your website.

When creating an AdWords advert, it is important to remember you have very few characters to work with. The headline of the advert needs to be up to 25 characters and the remaining 2 lines of the advert and the "display URL" need to be up to 35 characters long.

An important point to note is that whenever a word in your advert matches one of the keywords your potential visitor has entered into the Google search box, the word appears in bold. This has the effect of making the advert stand out more than the surrounding adverts which do not have bold. Therefore your aim is to ensure you have as much of the advert as possible in bold to capture attention.

Headline

The headline of the AdWords advert needs to closely match the keywords your potential visitor will have used when searching. These keywords should match your product or service.

For example:

Bristol Bouncy Castles

Hire A Bouncy Castle From £45

Many Different Sizes Available

Castles.BristolPartyHire.co.uk

In the example above the headline matches the keywords Bristol Bouncy Castles.

A very common mistake is to put the name of the company in the headline. The advert is not about you, or your company. The visitor wants to make sure that they will be taken to a website that matches what they are searching for!

Advert creation

When creating the main 2 lines of your advert, you need to capture their attention with a compelling message. Here are some tips for writing effective messages:

• These are the most powerful words in the English language (according to a Yale University study) so aim to include one or more of these if possible:
• You
• Money
• Save
• New
• Results
• Easy
• Health
• Safety
• Love
• Discovery

·        Proven
·        Guaranteed

• Include figures wherever possible. For example, are you a locksmith who is available 24 hours per day? Then write in your advert "Call 24/7". Do you offer free 24 hour delivery? Then include this in your advert! However a common error I see is to include the telephone number in the advert - possibly in the hope that people will just call immediately rather than click the advert first. This is unlikely to work, and uses valuable advert space.

A useful tip is to include the price in your advert if you might otherwise attract the wrong type of visitors. For example, we only offer Excel courses during the day and not evening or weekend classes, so we include the price of £225. Visitors seeking the evening and weekend classes are put off by the price as they are usually seeking cheaper college courses. They therefore do not click the advert, which saves us money in the long term.

• Consider asking a question which conceals a benefit. This will increase your Click Through Rate (CTR) hugely! For example

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