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Welcome to Part 3 of my Guide to Google Adwords. I finally managed to find some time to write this part. In part two we talked about keyword research, now we move on to Adwords Advert design.

Ad Copy Design & Structure

Google Adwords Adverts are similar in many ways to the small adverts you find in Newspapers, Magazines and in Shop Windows – they are very small and usually surrounded and by other Adverts and Articles in a busy space.

The primary purpose of you Ad is to attract the surfers eye so that they ultimately click on your advert and visit your website. In order for your ad to achieve this it needs to stand out!

Let’s go through the structure of an Adwords Advert:

Headline

Your headline needs to attract your target market to your advert. The best way to do this is to ensure your Headline matches the surfers search terms. By doing this your Headline will automatically be Bolded by Google making your Ad stand out over your competitors.

First Line

The best adverts always contain two points, benefits and features. You need to include both in order to get your message across clearly. Benefits are great because they appeal to people emotions and are usually a more effective sales tool. Features are the facts about what your product or service does or offers.

Your advert needs to contain both in order to be successful. I usually add a benefit to the first line to create an emotional response. The best way to approach this is to imagine your visitors thinking “what’s in it for me?”

For example a benefit maybe “Increase your Return from Adwords”

Second Line

The second line of you advert need to include a feature and a call to action. By telling the searcher to take an action you increase the chances of them actually doing it. For example if you have a free guide or ebook it’s probably the best feature of your site. Add it to the advert and tell them to download it:

“Free SEO Tips Ebook. Download Now”

Display URL

Your Display URL can be anything you want providing it’s a real working URL. At it’s valuable space on your ad try and use it to further promote your benefits and features.

For Example.

www.1upsearch.com/freeseotips

Destination URL

This is the actual URL that your visitors will be sent to. Don’t land all your visitors on the homepage. Your visitors need to arrive on pages specifically designed for them based on their search terms. These pages are called “Landing Pages” and I’ll go into more detail on what makes a good landing page in a future article.

In this example we would land the visitors on page that contains the free Ebook download.

Split Testing

Google Adwords allows you to create multiple adverts for each Adgroup. This is great as it allows you to carry out “Split Testing”. Split testing is when multiple adverts are created with slight differences to find out which one performs best. By doing this you can quickly see which one has a higher Click Through Ratio (CTR). You can then remove adverts that are performing poorly. Remember a high CTR means higher ad placements at a lower cost!

Summary

I’ll summarise with a few bullet points:

• Spend time designing your ads, a good can have a huge impact
• Include a Benefit, Feature and Call to Action
• Use the Display URL to insert keywords
• Point your visitors towards landing pages, not the homepage
• Use split testing to find your best adverts.

Part 4 on its way soon. Be the first to know by subscribing to my RSS feed.