Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click ads need to be as near perfect as possible.  How do you do this?  Well, there’s no scientific formula for doing this, but here are some ideas.  Look at several other (dozens of other) people’s ads and decide which ones make YOU want to click on them. Write yours in a similar way to these.   Write using words that make people afraid of missing out on something (“everybody is doing this!”).  Make sure that punctuation helps to make your words make sense.

Once written, leave the ad and don’t look at it again until the day after.  See if it STILL looks good and makes you want to click it.

DON’T MAKE SPELLING ERRORS!  There’s no need for ANY spelling errors with so few words and all the spell-checking software and dictionary.com online.  Also, make your hyperlink easy to read: don’t write www.lukehawthorne.com, rather write www.LukeHawthorne.com, capitalizing each word or name.

Ensure that you get the readers attention.  You are competing against other ads offering similar products.  That the whole idea of Adwords advertising; only ads that are RELEVANT to the search will be shown on the result-page.  The ad is there for no other reason than to MAKE THEM CLICK it.  It isn’t meant to sell them anything so don’t try.  You just want them to click it, so make them CURIOUS about what they might see IF they click.

Place the keywords you’ve chosen in your headline, then again in the second line, but if you have to choose, keep them in the headline and don’t worry about the second line.

The last line of your ad is also very important of course, and you should try and think like this “if I could only write ONE line, how could I make that one line get them to click?”……….then write each line with this same thought in mind.  Let the reader know that clicking YOUR link rather than the others on the page is really the only choice to make.  Let them know what the BENEFITS are if they DO click on your ad.  So, rather than say “Golf Clubs for sale”, say “85% off Golf Clubs”.  The benefit to the reader is a cost-saving.  Which would YOU rather click?

Don’t use words that have more than one meaning.  It may be cute and clever, but it won’t get you any clicks.  And don’t be deceptive. If you say “85% off Golf Clubs” and you don’t offer anything of the kind, you’ll just end up paying for thousands of clicks and have no sales to pay for them!

SPLIT-TEST your ads!  Make sure that you try different ads pointing to the same website and MONITOR which ads get you the most clicks. When you split-test, make sure that you ONLY change ONE thing in each ad.  If you don’t do this, you won’t know what is making the difference in the click-through rate.

PPC campaigns take time to get right, but once you DO get them right, they will pay you back for a very long time to come!

Luke.