Text Ads: How to Optimize Your Text Ads for PPC

Compelling, targeted text ads are crucial to a high-performance PPC campaign. They’re often the first contact that a potential customer has with your site: they search for something related to your business, and your ad shows up in the results. Whether or not they click on your ad and get to your website depends on how powerful your message is and how relevant it is to what they want.

Since the PPC text ad is so often the “first touch,” it’s crucial that you get them right. Creating well-written Google ADs ads offers some very obvious benefits:

• Improved Click-Through Rate
• Better Quality Scores
• Lower CPA (Cost Per Action)

The most important things to keep in mind when writing ad text are making sure your ad is highly relevant:

• To your product or service
• To the searcher’s intent (which can usually be inferred from the keyword and context)
• To your PPC landing page

The simplest possible version of a PPC text ad looks like this:

It consists of a headline, a display URL, and two lines of description. Each line of the ad has a limited character count; there’s an art to writing an eye-catching, compelling message that, ideally:

• Contains the relevant keyword at least once.
• Communicates your unique value proposition, i.e., the benefits of your offering and why people should visit your site to learn more.
• Includes a compelling call to action, or a command that tells the searcher what to do and what they’ll get when they click on the ad.

Google offers plenty of tools to make your ads more compelling. For example, you can use ad extensions to provide additional links for the user to click on, as well more information about your product. This additional info might include:

• Location and contact information, such as physical address and phone number.
• Images of products in your inventory or other features, like a hotel room.
• An email field so that users can sign up for an email list right from the Google search results page.

The Importance of Regular Ad Text Optimization

Top-performing PPC advertisers are always testing and tweaking their ads to find the most compelling messaging for each keyword group, in order to maximize clicks and Quality Score and ultimately lower cost per action, which equates to higher ROI.

Your optimizations don’t have to be fancy, either. Even the basics like making sure your ad follows best practices and is in line with Google’s quality guidelines can be helpful; or reusing messaging that’s already working in your best-performing ads.

The Value of Better Ad Text

When your ad is more relevant to the searcher, your CTR improves, and high CTR is the single largest component of your Quality Scores. High Quality Scores lift your whole Google Ads account and are good for your business. Why? Because Quality Score works to improve your ad rankings while lowering your cost per click!

If you spend just a few minutes a week to improve the relevance and CTR of your ads – throw out your worst two ads and replace them with new text, or try out a new ad extension – you’ll be on your way to a better-performing PPC account.