Although pay-per-click advertising offers a great opportunity to fulfil certain marketing goals quickly, you will need to take a few extra steps to optimise your PPC ad copy. Simply creating an ad and getting it published without giving much thought to its actual content is not likely to yield a satisfactory return on investment. After all, your goal is to have the right people see your ads, click on them and then continue the consumer journey.
1. Publish Relevant Content
You typically don’t have a lot of space to work with, even if you opt for image-based ads. You certainly won’t have words to waste, so relevancy is absolutely critical. Do not try to game the system by targeting popular yet irrelevant key words and phrases. A good ad copy should point out a couple of features and benefits of the product or service you are trying to sale, followed by a call to action (CTA). Use your primary keywords and never, ever try to lead your target audience astray.
2. Create a Powerful Call to Action
No PPC ad copy would be complete without a strong CTA that encourages the viewer to click. You must formulate the CTA based on the primary goal of your advertising campaign. After all, a compelling call to action is one that guides the target audience towards taking a specific action, whether it’s to sign up to your email newsletter or take advantage of a special offer. Always use actionable words in your CTAs, and back them up by highlighting a couple of key benefits.
3. Focus on Benefits
Specifications are helpful, but you don’t have enough space to waste on such content in a typical PPC ad. Instead of listing specifications, focus on highlighting the most important benefits of your product or service. People want to know why they should click on an ad and what they’ll gain. Sometimes, the most obvious benefit to highlight isn’t the best one to focus on, and highlighting a feature that sets your product or service apart from the competition is usually a more effective approach.
4. Don’t Spam
As obvious as it may sound, avoiding spammy content is imperative. Writing an ad copy that leads potential customers astray will serve only to harm your reputation and greatly reduce the return on investment. Use only accurate and relevant content without being unnecessarily hyperbolic in your choice of words. Avoid exclamation points and generic CTAs to help build up a sense of trust.
5. A/B Test
You might spend a great deal of time crafting what you think is an excellent ad copy, but it’s all wasted if you don’t test it thoroughly. With A/B testing, you write two ads and run them both at the same time to see which one performs better. Afterwards, you discard the underperforming ad to replace it with another. By repeating the process, the effectiveness of your PPC advertising campaign will improve continually.
Key Takeaways
PPC advertising can quickly get expensive, even though you can usually set a daily budget. However, to maximize the return on your investment, you’ll need to take every step to test and optimize your PPC copy. If you’re still not quite sure where to start, take a look at what your competitors are doing by searching for your own primary keywords in search engines like Google or Bing.
What is your strategy for better PPC ad copy?
