effective ad text

Does anybody have some general advice for more effective ad text?

I am not much of a copy writer and without diving into my specific business I was wondering if there were some key words, or styles of ads that got a bit more attention.

 

Do you mean for Adwords and Overture? Or for other advertising prodcuts?

EDIT: Oops, didn't see what category this was in...

For Adwords, I like to think of the text as haikus. Short, sweet and to the point.

You need to begin with something that answers the searchers query. Dynamic Text works well here - but use it in conjunction with other words. For products, you can do Sale: {KeyWord}. Always capitalize.

The next line should so why you are unique. Do you have a special deal? A great unique product? Good service?

Then you need a call to action. What should the searcher do? Why?

Reply with what you are advertising and we can try some adwords examples...

 

I always try to include the following:

• Eye-catching start word
• Feature or Benefit
• Call to action

For instance

Headline: Whatever you come up with (Try to include your keyword in the headline)

Description: Incredible widgets available for
your home or office. Download our free trial.

My ads tend to follow that kind of model.

 

Post 3 complete examples of the ad text that you already has (including display URL) and I show you some ideas.

This is an AdWords Forum

Also what would be the difference of an effective Ad for AdWords and for Overture?

 

See my edit.

Oh, big difference - for many reasons.

#1 The sizes. Yahoo gives you more room to space to write an ad, but it needs to work in the small version (on the right) as well. In fact, you can take advantage of the ellipses Yahoo puts on those ads.
#2 The searchers. Different people use Google and Yahoo, looking for different things. Product searches feature more heavily in Google and entertainment searches in Yahoo. Generic terms seem to do better in Google as well.
#3 Pre-qualifying. The biggest difference. In Google, you want a high CTR to lower your CPC. In Yahoo, your position is only affected by your CPC. So you can pre-qualify searchers in your ad. "ipod" and "video ipod 4g" are not the same term. If you are selling ipods, make sure your Yahoo only appeals to people looking to buy.

 

Be clear of the motive of your ad - you are preselling your website or product. The actual sale is made inside the website with your content, product descriptions etc.

So the motive is to convince the searcher that your site will provide him what he needs. All the techniques mentioned by FeldBum and MediaMagnet will help you do just that.

 

Thanks everyone for the great info it got my creative juices flowing a bit.

My first ad wasn't very good, it was on a site targeted cpm campaign and I had 0 ctr on about 3,000 impressions. Not sure how the rates for others but my adSense ads do much better then that

My target audience is pretty niche and hard to pin down. (Freelance IT Instructors). There are lots of sites for techs and lots of sites for freelanceers but not as many that cater specifically to IT Instructors unless they are sort of "competitors". So I expect that some of the problem is that the impressions are not relevent to most viewers.

Here is my current ad text.

IT Instructor jobs
This is where the action is for
freelance instructors, join now
www.trainmark.com/

I was really trying to avoid using the word "jobs" ince there are so many ads in that category. I'd rather find something more creative that stands out but I have a hard time with that sort of thing.

Maybe....

Get More Training Gigs
Our testimonials will move you
Join today and get in on the action
www.trainmark.com/


Hmm I kinda like that I'll give it a whirl.

 

LOL now my ad probably won't show because the ad text won't match the pages I want it to show on.

 

I ran a different style of ad (not like any previous ad I had run before) with a different landing page.

Totally amazing the results I had.

My search total CTR increased 2 fold and my Content Search impressions more than doubled with nearly 3 times the CTR!!

Even managed a few more conversions too!

Now regularly trying 'off the wall' ads that are very different to the competion and they seem to be working really well!

 

If you are selling some product or service, is a good idea to include the price in your ad.
say "Web hosting from 9.99 a month" that way, if someone is looking for something cheaper than your services, they won't click (you don't want them anyway) and won't waste your money.

 

I think this is an excellent approach, and one that I've used with success in other marketing areas. Just as visitors suffer from "banner blindness", I believe that they may suffer from "ad copy blindness", as well. After awhile, all of the ads look the same, and consequently, lose their effectiveness. I'd be interested to know if anyone's ever heard of any research in this area.

Sam

 

When I was an adwords newbie (3 weeks ago), hehe,
I started checking out how my competitors ads looked like.
That also gave me a few ideas for more keywords and phrases to cover.

 

This is a technique that works for me.
1. After your first ad, create a second one changing the wording, place of the sentences, etc. and see how they perform against each other.
2. Delete the one that performs poorest
3. Create a new ad based in the best one
don't go more than three ads since you will have too few data to evaluate.
4. repeat step 1

This way you will develop your best ad with natural selection!

 

That's a very Darwinian approach. When you say "don't go more than three ads since you will have too few data to evaluate", do you mean no more than three ads at once, or no more than three ads total for the process?

Sam

 

To me the most important thing is to make sure that people who aren't likely to sign up are less likely to click the CPC ad. For instance if I'm running an AdWords campaign to try to sell panties I try to make sure the reader knows I want to make a sale to him/her, before they click to enter. This has worked well for me to test ideas on a ridiculously low budget.

 

I mean no more than three add at once. However, you can pick your own number.
You can repeat the process as many times as you want.

Using your "Darwinian approach" term, you could develop a "mutation": an ad that varies a lot from the others but still retains something of the original and go from there, repeating the process.

 

Watch out for making too many changes!!

I have modified ads over a period of time and found that because they are so different that they do not get any NEW clicks just repeat clicks.

All this does is burn you money!!

 

Old thread - but I just wanted to say thanks for sharing the info. I am an AdWords newb as well - honestly I didn't even notice you could have multiple ads for the same keywords until now...nice to run wording trials.

 

Keep a minimum of 6 ads per ad group every time.

After some time create more ads based on top CTR% ad and delete the worst performing ad.