Developing Ad Copy for Your SEM Campaign

I'm in process of optimizing a campaign for a client and thought it would be a useful post to provide some guidelines on how to write ad copy. I'm going to approach this at a high level for now.

1. Make sure your ad copy is relevant to your ad group and landing page. The more relevant your ad is to the search query and landing page content, the better your Quality Score will be and you will experience some cost savings.

2. Using AdWords as the specific example, you've got three lines to work with for a total of 95 characters. Break down each line into three distinct sections:

a. The Headline (25 characters): like headlines in newspapers, you've got to attract the searchers attention. Keep in mind
you're vying for the attention of a searcher who is looking at organic results and your competitors ads.

b. First Description Line (35 characters): you'll find yourself getting creative to convey your message within the character
limitations. State the product/service you're offering in this first line. Its the set-up for line two....

c. Second Description Line (35 characters): here you want to trigger an action. "Buy now" is a call to action and tells people
what to expect when they click on your ad.

I recommend you develop ad copy in excel, create multiple versions and use the LEN formula to calculate character count. Don't implement your ad copy right away no matter how compelling it is. Sleep on it and approach it later to make sure the ads make sense as a whole and clearly state the value a searcher will experience by going to your site. Implement 3 versions of ad copy and see which one performs better (be sure to allow the ads to be displayed evenly).