The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

Writing effective ad copy is one of the most difficult parts of search engine marketing—or of marketing in general for that matter. Creativity always helps, but there are a number of tips you can use when you can't depend on inspiration. They won't get you to "Bo Knows Baseball," but they'll drive clicks, improve conversion rates, and lead to more effective campaigns overall.

Relate Your Ad Copy to Your Keywords and Landing Pages
The first tip to keep in mind is one of the most important general rules of search engine marketing: always make sure that your ad copy aligns closely with the keywords in your ad group and the copy on your landing page. This rule is most often discussed in the context of improving your Quality Score, and it will certainly help in that department. However, it’s always important to remember that Quality Scores aren’t arbitrary. As we discuss in detail in our tutorial on Understanding Quality Scores, they’re a measure of your ad’s relevance to what users are searching for and what you have to offer. Maintaining a tight relationship between ad copy, keywords and landing pages will help improve your rankings and drive down your average CPC. But, even if doing so had no impact on your bids and budgets, it would still be good advice.

Think of Each Ad Component Separately
While AdWords search marketing ads need to be limited to under 100 characters (up to 25 for the headline, and 35 each for the description line and “call to action”), it still helps to consider each component individually, rather than trying to tackle an entire ad all at once.

There are three components to a search marketing ad. They are:

1) The Headline
The goal here is to grab the user’s attention: you’ll be competing with the organic search results, as well as other ads on the page.

2) The Description Line
This is where you clearly define the product or service you have to offer, and how it will meet the need indicated by a user’s search.

3) The “Call to Action”
Finally, the “call to action” is where you tell the user what to do after they click on your ad and land on your Web site. This should be related to the type of conversion you’re trying to achieve, such as newsletter sign-ups to online sales.

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll review each of these components in detail in separate posts.

Mind the Transitions
Now that I’ve told you to consider each component of a search marketing ad separately, I’m going to hedge slightly and ask that you also pay some attention to how your ad holds together as a whole. Most of the time, this won’t require much more than reading it through and making sure that none of the transitions — between your headline and your description, or between your description and your “call to action” — is too abrupt. We’ll consider this point in more detail following our review of the three components listed above.

Note: This is the first in a series of posts about writing effective ad copy. Stay tuned for future installments!

To read other Best Practices Tutorials, click here to visit Clickable University.

As we mentioned in our introduction to writing effective ad copy , there are three primary things that

Google recently announced that starting on June 15, advertisers will be able to include trademarked terms