Great idea for a post! I've been doing this for five years, I'll pass along some of the things I do, in case they're useful to anyone.
- Upper Case Proper capitalization makes your ad (and particularly your main points) stand out more. I use it on the display url, without the www, particularly if I have more than one keyword in the domain - for example, instead of californiaholidaygifts.com, I would use CaliforniaHolidayGifts.com. It groups the words together, and makes it easier for the eyeballs to make out. I also use capitalization in the ad as well - for everything but the small words. Example: "What You Need to Know Today!"
- You're Allowed One Exclamation Point - Use it! You are allowed to use one exclamation point in your ad text - not in the first line, but in the ad itself. I feel it draws attention and makes the ad a little more compelling. To me, "Huge Selection at Low Cost Pricing!" makes the point better than "Huge Selection at Low Cost Pricing".
- Include a Call to Action That's an advertising standard. Granted you don't have a lot of room, but if you can fit it in, include a call to action. You're not allowed to say "click here" but you can use words like "Find", "Get", "Act Now", "Buy", and "Order". You have to TELL people what you want them to do.
- Check out the competition Before you write your ad, go check out what the OTHER ads for your keywords look like. Copying is NOT a good thing. There's no rule against, or even any penalty (except maybe incurring the wrath of your competitors) but unless you are bidding for the very top position every time (expensive!) your ad simply won't stand out amongst the others. Think about how the searcher looks at the page - they have something in mind that they want, and they are looking to find it, and probably ignoring every other thing on the page that ISN'T what they are looking for. As there are more and more ads everywhere, there is also more and more ad blindness developing. Heck, I am growing more ad blind myself, and I'm in the ad business! So you need to write something that will stand out in the pack, and attract notice. That said...
- Be Honest Don't promise what isn't going to be there. This will back up on you several ways. For one things, ad costs mount up - you don't want anyone clicking on your ads out of idle curiousity, you only want someone to click who is looking for exactly what you are offering on your landing page, be it a product, or an offer, or parked domain ads. So you need to be laser-focused in your text, and tell them exactly what they're going to get when they hit your page. Of course, you can tart it up and make it look nice - you don't necessarily want to say "Hey, you're going to get a page full of ads here" you tell them they are going to get information and resources - see my examples below. The other thing is, the more focused your ad is, the better the Quality Score, and the less likely you will be to get the Google Slap and have your minimum bids all turned to $5 and $10. And lastly - you don't want to tick off your user when he clicks to find something he wasn't expecting - if he's ticked, he'll just use the back button instead of what YOU have, because you've just wasted his time.
- Proper Grammar, Spelling and English, please Or whatever language you're writing in. If you are advertising in a language not your own, be sure it's properly formed, even if you have to find someone to proof them for you. Sloppy ads impress no one.
- Test Test Test With AdWords, it's really easy to do split A/B testing, where you run two or more ads for a period of time in even rotation, then look at the results and CTRs, and see which performs better. So first, write two ads that are different. They can be totally different if you like, but if I am really trying to narrow down what performs best, I usually only vary them by one line at a time. It depends on what you want to test. Anyway, so you have your two ads in the Ad Group. Then you go into the Campaign Settings (you can only do this part at the Campaign level) and where it says Ad Serving, it will by default have Optimize selected. That's where they figure which ad is doing better, and start to show that one more. But you're doing a test, which means you need a level playing field, so you want to change that setting to Rotate My Ads More Evenly, at least for the duration of the test. That way you'll know your two ads had a more or less even chance of performing. Let them run for a few days or a week - I generally try to get at least 1000 impressions on a test - and see which one is better. Then pause the lesser one, and run the better one - or start a NEW test, with another ad, until you have something that's really working well for you. I am ALWAYS testing.
That's a few tips, hope it helps. I'll put a few of my ads down below - not all of them are for parking, but you'll get the idea. Since some of them are for clients, and some are for competitive markets, I am disguising them a little, but you'll get the genuine gist.
My parking ads are too new, but on product ads I routinely get from 20% to 100% click thru rates, so it works for me.
Ad Samples - these don't fit the length guidelines, because I'm not saying what they are for - but you get the idea
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And so on. More later - it's football Saturday!
