Ad Copy Capitalisation
The advertising space in the Google SERP is often quite saturated with ads and this means you have to figure out ways to make your ad more eye-catching.
This is where the formatting of your text comes in. Something as simple as capitalising the text in your ad in Proper Format makes your words stand out against others that aren’t.
Compare the following lines:
This Text Has Proper Formatting.
This text has no proper formatting.
Just glance at those lines and it’s clear which one grabs your eye more.
This has also become a bit of an industry standard so you’ll want to make sure you’re doing this so that your ads aren’t less effective than a competitor’s.
AdWords Editor & Excel
Anyone who has used the online interface in AdWords to make a lot of changes to a medium/large account will know just how frustrating it is. It is only within the last 6 months that Google has added the means to make some changes in bulk.
Another way of doing things, and interacting with AdWords in general, is to use the AdWords Editor software in conjunction with a spreadsheet application like Excel.
The AdWords Editor is a windows desktop application that allows you to make offline changes in bulk to an AdWords account before sending all these changes to a campaign with the click of a few buttons. Its greatest asset is the ability to import data from Excel. So you can quickly put together a huge number of changes in excel, import it to Editor and then hit the upload button to send them all to the account once you’re happy with them.
Search Term Report
The search term report is a tool within AdWords that lets you see the specific terms that people used before clicking on any of your ads and it’s a good source of information for discovering new keywords for an account. By looking at the keywords you don’t already have within the account you can begin to see if there are any terms that you need to add as negatives to block unwanted traffic or as positives to target and drive new relevant traffic to a site.
Site-link Extensions
Site-link extensions are one of the many different ad extensions you can apply to ad copy and are particularly useful for a number of reasons.
They increase the size of your ad, giving you a larger presence in the SERP, they allow you to provide deeper relevant links to other areas of your site and they can contain additional Unique Selling Points and Calls To Action.
Additionally, AdWords recently rolled out Enhanced Site-link extensions that allow you to track the individual performance of each additional link you add to an ad, letting you determine which ads are performing and which aren’t. This means you can further tweak and optimise an ad to get great results.
Keywords & Ad Copy
It’s very important to include the keyword within the ad copy that’s targetting it. For one thing, if the keyword is present in the ad, the searcher using it will spot it quickly and be drawn to it. In addition, the keyword will be emboldened making it even more eye-catching to a user and will lead to a higher Click Through Rate.
Google also considers a keyword’s presence in ad copy as one of the relevant variables that affects Quality Score, the idea behind it being that for an ad to be relevant, the search term would obviously be part of the ad. So placing the keyword in the ad copy will help increase your QS and in turn bring down your bid price as well as drive more traffic through your ad.
