PPC Ad Copywriting: 6 Essential Steps

Creating compelling, action-driven ad copy is a must for any successful PPC campaign. While at times tedious, you will thank yourself for taking the time and energy to create ad text that will engage your target audience and ultimately drive your performance goals. For those of you who haven’t been giving your ad copy the attention it deserves, now is the time to do so. In this blog, I outline some of the best practices for ad copy creation.

There are a number of key things to consider during the ad copy creation process in order to achieve optimum performance.

1. Who is your competition and what does their ad copy look like? Understanding your competitors and what their focus is, provides you with an opportunity to tell your audience why you are better than the competition. If your competitor is focusing on price, and yours is better, be sure to include pricing in your ad copy.
2. Write compelling headlines. The headline of your ad copy is the first thing people see. Incorporate keywords from your ad group into the headline if possible.  Ensuring the highest relevancy between the headline and the user search is essential.
3. Strategic punctuation. Add a period at the end of description line 1 - this qualifies line 1 to appear next to the headline in some instances.  The headline is of huge importance, so getting double the messaging in that top line is a major score.
4. Stand out from the crowd. Use registered/copyright marks if applicable. It further solidifies your brand and boosts consumer confidence.
5. Always be testing. Isolate one element from your ad copy to be tested. (the heading, description line1, description line 2, or display URL).
6. Always be testing, part 2. Create at least 2 to 3 ad copy variations to test against your control. Ad variations should be identical except for the element being tested.

The amount of time you will need the ads to run before the results are statistically significant varies depending on the amount of traffic the campaign receives. Ensure that your ad copy test has collected enough data before reporting results.

Once you’ve gained enough data, you need to identify the winning ad copy, the ad copy with the highest CTR. In your next phase of testing your winner will become the control to be tested against 2 - 3 new ad variations.