Enterprise Mastermind

In Part 1 we covered how to research keywords and split them for use in different ad groups, allowing you to target multiple markets from one set of keywords.

If you followed Part 1 you will now have a set of 10 keywords that you have split into at least 2 separate groups. Here are my examples again:

Dress:
mens hats
mens dress hats
mens fedora hats
mens panama hats
mens brim hats

Casual:
mens straw hats
mens beach hats
mens bucket hats
mens baseball hats
mens trucker hats

Now we need to write the ads for anyone looking for dress hats. If you haven’t already, remember to adapt my examples to your own market and associated keywords.

Writing your first Google Adwords headline

The headline of your Google Adwords ad is the most crucial with regards to the CTR (click through rate) that it will receive. One thing to make note of is that an Adwords ad will always receive a higher click through rate if the headline exactly matches the search term the user has input. Luckily for us Google has something called ‘dynamic keyword insertion’ which we will now use to build our attention grabbing headline.

Headlines are formed like this:

{Keyword:Mens Dress Hats} or
{KeyWord:Mens Dress Hats}

The use of brackets ( { } ) tells Google to use dynamic keyword insertion and will result in a headline made up of the users search terms up to 25 characters long.

Note that the only difference between these 2 examples is the word Keyword. Google recognises the capital W in KeyWord as an instruction to capitalise the whole headline. If the users search term is too long (over 25 characters) the backup headline - the text after the colon ( : ) will be displayed. Always use the most popular search term (from Part 1) for the backup headlines in your two ad groups.

So if the user searches for ‘mens dress hats’ the first example would return a headline of ‘Mens dress hats’ while the second example would result in ‘Mens Dress Hats’.

Writing your ad copy

With an Adwords ad you are allowed 2 lines of 35 characters underneath your headline. A tried and tested method of ad construction is the ‘benefit/features’ method. The ad we will be building here will display benefits of your product or service in the first line and the strongest features of your product or service in the second line. Most users will purchase due to the benefits of a product or service.

So in our example we could have:

{KeyWord:Mens Dress Hats}
Stylish hats to get you noticed
In a range of colours and sizes
www.myhatstore.co.uk

This style of advert will appeal to your users emotions (benefits) and also their sensiblities (features).

Choose your URL

Your URL (uniform resource locator or web address as it is more commonly known) can also be shown in multiple formats. Each format will have quite dramatic effects on the CTR and you should conduct tests (see next section) to see which style works best for your individual ad groups. From my own experience using capitalised words within your URL i.e www.MyHatStore.co.uk will get the best CTR.

Other choices include:

www.myhatstore.co.uk

MyHatStore.co.uk

myhatstore.co.uk

MyHatStore.co.uk/Hats

www.MyHatStore.co.uk/Hats

Test your ads

Use split testing to keep beating your own ad performance. To do this create two ads for your campaign. Make them both identical but alter the first line of the ad so one shows a different benefit. Wait until each ad has received 50 or so clicks and use www.splittester.com to find which ad is performing the best. Keep that ad and replace the poorest performer with one where you have changed both the benefit AND how the URL is displayed.

Keep tweaking the ads in this way by changing the poorest performing ad and split testing until you have got your CTR up to at least 5%.

The smallest changes can make dramatic changes to your CTR and the tips above won’t work for all adverts all of the time. The following are just a few extra methods you can test to increase your CTR:

• remove or place commas between individual elements on your ad text
• use a normal headline within your ad instead of using dynamic keyword insertion
• remove or place full stops at the end of your ad text
• remove or replace hyphens where needed within your ad text
• use capital letters on some or all of the words within your ad text
• register new domain names and use them within your ad