A budget is now established, and it’s time to let some creativity loose. Of course I’m talking about the actual design of the ad copy and landing page of the campaign.

In order to come up with effective ad copy, we needed the ad to be powerful and action-oriented. It’s critical for the text to be strong because without the right ad copy, there is no point in paying for bids on the keywords that we selected. The key is to make it attractive for the targeted audience to click on our ad rather than anyone else’s. So there are two basic requirements for ad copy writing:

1. Writing text copy for the search engine ad.
2. Writing the copy for the landing page.

This blog I will be focusing primarily on the first step, and next week I will talk more about writing the copy for the actual landing page.

Step 1: Writing text copy for the search engine ad: This is the first challenge that we faced, because it requires excellent copy writing and editorial skills. We needed to make sure that we…

• Were within character limits: character limits was an area that I completely underestimated; 25 characters for a headline and 40 characters for the ad is more than enough, right??? Well not really. The character limits force us to be short and sweet and more importantly directly to the point. It’s also important to keep in mind that different search engines have different requirements. The above ones mentioned are for Google. The following is an example of what we came up with for one of our keywords:

• Increase site traffic and sales
• SEO professionals ready to help
• Free consult, Contact Us Today!

The terms that are bolded represent the ones that we are going to use as our variation terms. Changing the ad every couple of days by using a variation term can produce much different results. It sounds unrealistic, but the reality is that people are going to appeal to different words, and when we keep working on the ad, tweaking it every once in a while with the variations we should have a final product that produces the best results.

The following are the words we are going to use as variations for the bolded words

• Increase: Boost; improve; advance; pick up; perk up
• Professionals: experts; writers; specialists
• Ready to help: standing by; ready to assist; prepared to help; prepared to assist
• Free consult: Get a free consult; packages start at $$$$; $$$$ + packages
• Contact: Call; get in touch with; please contact; please call

So you get the idea, similar terms that mean the same thing that have the potential of producing different results.

• Use our target keywords in the ad copy. Since most PPC advertising is contextual, finding the search term in the actual ad will attract the searcher. Therefore we used “SEO” directly in the ad, so that the search term is visible and clearly identifiable.

• Keep track of different ad copy, and make adjustments as we go along to the less effective ones. I talked a lot about this in the first point. Continuous monitoring of the PPC ad is necessary to be able to tweak the ad to what brings the best results. I’ve read that this takes a maximum of half an hour per day, and I’ll be sure to let you know how long it takes me and what kind of changes I found better results with.

• Most importantly, include a powerful sales message in the ad copy which will entice the user to click on our ad. This is a call to action, a message that tells the user what to do so that they take that next step by clicking on the ad and going to the landing page. In the above example our sales message is: Contact us today!

Next week I’ll talk more in detail about step 2, writing the copy of the landing page. I must say it was a lot of fun playing around with words and realizing the power of each term. Have fun when you go through this step and enjoy this creative part of the PPC campaign!