If keywords are the most important part of your campaign then the ad has to be the second most important part as this is what gets your viewer to click through. You only have a small space to type the ad in, a total of 85 characters split over three lines, trust me, writing ads can drive you crazy!

So how do you write a good ad? Well I don’t like hard work, I prefer to work smart not hard, so I’d say as the first point of call you should look at the ads that are currently running. They have probably been tested for a while now and that ad you are seeing is the result of all that testing.

Don’t copy an ad word for word, but just take the basic idea and build yours around that.

Let’s break writing an ad down into four section and look at each one in turn:

* Ad ideas
* Title
* Body
* Call to action

Ad ideas
First you need to start off with an idea to base your ad around, the best way is to think of the one benefit that the customer wants. Notice I said benefit as most people sell features.

So if you were selling a toaster then most people would write boring ads about how theirs has a triple heating element system, or theirs is chrome. People don’t want that, they want what those features can GIVE them. It’s all about the potential customer.

Having that triple heating element is great, but the benefit to the customer is they get their delicious hot buttered toast a lot quicker in the morning. Chrome looks good, but don’t leave it up to them to decide why it is good – tell them how good it is going to look in their kitchen!

Price could be a benefit, although it is not in most markets, but the key here is to test, so choose one idea that you think the customers will appreciate, and get the ad up and test it against another idea (testing covered in a minute!) to find out what the customer really wants.

The title
This is where you grab the visitor by the eyeballs and compel them to look at your ad, so it needs to be attention grabbing but not offensive. Some of the best titles are:

Questions:
Questions seem to be a consistent winner in Adwords, we respond to questions and they engage us and force us to look underneath to see if the answer is there. You can also use something called cognitive dissonance which is a human trait where we hate to leave things unfinished or hate to not know the answer to things.

So if you pose a question to someone then tell them the answer is on the page they will get to if they click, that is powerful! (don’t ask them to click.. Google doesn’t like that!)

But for now let’s just concentrate on the title, so say someone was looking for a toaster, then you have 25 characters to pose a question to them that will grab their attention. How about…

Looking For a Toaster? (22 characters)

Or if you think they have broken their old one then you could do…

Toaster Trouble? (16 characters)

That helps you to separate people, if you run a toaster repair company then using the second title ensures you just get people with broken toasters contacting you, the first title also captures people looking to buy their first toaster as well as people looking to get a replacement.

Just the keyword they are looking for in the title

If you look at the ads that appear when you search then you will see that the keywords you typed into the search are in bold in the ads, this is a great way to get attention!

You can combine that power with the power to give them exactly what they are searching for by just putting the common keywords for your ad group as the title of the ad. So you remember earlier I had an ad group where every keyword phrase had the words ‘cheapest blue widgets’ in them somewhere?

So you would put that as the title, then you are guaranteed to have the whole title to your ad in bold, plus you are giving them what they want, if they are looking for something to do with ‘cheapest blue widgets’ and that is exactly the title of your ad then will they think your ad is relevant to them? Of course they will!

Announcements
Another great way to grab attention is to announce something, we are always on the look out for good announcements as they tell us new or cool stuff, so use that to your advantage with titles like:

New: Super Fast Toaster (23 characters)
Revealed: Insomnia Relief (25 characters)
Announced: New Widgets (22 characters)
Breakthrough New Toaster (24 characters)

Titles with figures in them
This revelation shocked me when I first found out about it, but apparently having figures of any sort in your ad attracts more clicks…? So try to use percentages or prices, anything that uses figures to grab attention like this:

New Toaster 71% Faster (22 characters)
30 x Stronger Vitamins (22 characters)
$10 Less Than Brand X (21 characters)

That should get you started towards writing a great title – let’s look at the body of the ad now:

Body & Call to Action
The body of the ad is where you need to condense the benefit for the viewer, but it is also where you need to put a ‘call to action’ if you can. A call to action is simply something that tells the person what to do and people respond unconsciously to them so they are very powerful if use them.

Try to get another set of keywords into the ad as well so they are bolded and also it will help your quality score which we’ll talk about later. Other than that the secret is just to keep revising it to get it right in such a small space, you don’t have to use all the space if you don’t want to, but also you can’t use artificially shortened words to free up space.

So for the keyword ‘Faster toaster’ we could try:

New Toaster 71% Faster (22 characters)
You get your hot buttered toast (31 characters)
71% Faster – learn how here (27 characters)

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Need A Faster Toaster? (22 characters)
You get your hot buttered toast 71% (35 characters)
Faster with us – learn how here (31 characters)

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Or for the keyword ‘Toaster repair’ we could try:

Toaster Trouble? (16 characters)
Save 75% on a new toaster with our (34 characters)
Repair service – find out more here (35 characters)

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Need Toaster Repair? (20 characters)
Save 75% on a new toaster with our (34 characters)
Repair service – find out more here (35 characters)

It is up to you to experiment until you find the perfect ad, just generate a load of ideas and one will stand out as the ideal ad.