AdWords campaigns can be made or lost on your adverts. Your adverts are the customers call to act. They pretty much control your CTR. As you know from my previous hubs your CTR is vital to a cost efficient campaign.

Now we are going to talk about the specifics of creating a good advert.Now your advert should fulfil 2 criterion;

1. Improve your Quality Score
2. To maximise CTR and conversion rates

Now starting with improving your quality score, this means you need your ad to be relevant to the keywords or phrases being typed. Thinking in terms of the text in your advert, this means that the terms you are bidding on should be in the advert text, preferably in the title.

A good example of this is a potential customer searches Letting agents in Swansea, you own a letting agent in Swansea called Snoring cats:

BAD AD

Snoring Cats (Title)
Snoring cats are a great Letting agent who will work hard to bring Landlords and Tenants together

GOOD AD

Letting Agent Swansea (Title)
Snoring cats is a letting agent which specialize helping tenants looking in the Swansea area find their dream home. Call us today.

Now why is this better? Well as you will notice the title and the text are specific to the term searched, so for example say this letting agent also worked in Llanelli, for this ad group, or keywords with Llanelli they would change all the Swansea's to Llanelli's.

This would be quite easy if every keyword had its own adgroup, but unless this is the case, you’ll need to choose your keyword groups very carefully, if you want them to have a very high Quality Score.

Dynamic Keyword Insertion "automatically putting the search term in the advert" is very clever and great for certain situations however doesn’t work very well. Google uses the default value, the word that you tell it to use if the search term is too long, to decide your Quality Score, so this has a detrimental effect on the quality of your ad.

Now Maximising your CTR and conversion rate, this is probably the most important part of the advert. How do you make people in a busy page full of what look like appropriate results click YOUR ad.

If we had a perfect answer we would be very rich people, but we don't so quite often it is trial and error, see what works for your specific niche.

DON'T mislead them, you are paying for every click but only get paid if someone buys your service/product, so whats the point you will just be spending money.

Below are a few basic points to remember about your advert

• Make it stand out - don’t use the same text that everyone else is using.

• Use strong words like: “Buy”, “Free”, “Now”, “New”, “Fast”, “Save”, “Great” and “Amazing”

• SELL your product - tell people what’s good about it, like “Free Delivery”, “Extended Warranty”

• If you have a great price, then tell people what it is.

• Try opening with a question - if product/service is the answer to a problem

• Put the search keyword/phrase in your advert. The title is best, but you can also try the body.Regularly test new adverts against the existing ones - Google’s got the functionality, so use it!

Here are gome more general but VERY important things to consider

• Use the language the potential customer has searched using, for example if they search "buying a Laptop with 2GB RAM, Pentium I7 processor and 500GB hard drive" Talk specific technical information in your ad. However if they search "Buying a laptop" Talk in plain English. This is vital to get customers with different knowledge bases to view you in a positive light.

• If you are selling a different product to everyone else, tell the searcher what your product will do for them. Do you guarantee to fill a landlords property in 2 weeks? Does your training course ‘turn beginners into experts in two weeks’? Does your workout make women ‘drop a dress size, guaranteed!’? What will your product do for people? How will their lives be better if they click on your advert?

• Do NOT exaggerate, people are very wary and can smell BS a mile away, and even if they click it won't turn into a sale because you can't deliver what you said. It's a waste of money.

• Use numbers if possible, it has been proved that numbers draw people's eyes more than words so use terms like "prices from £197", "2 4 1", "14 day money back guarantee", "10 great ways to". Try looking at the front of magazines they have been using these techniques for years, they are short snappy and draw your eye.

• There is a concept known as Haiku, which is used for capturing a mood, I will do a separate hub on this soon. But take a look at the links if you can't wait.

As i said nothing will work 100% of the time, trial and error and close monitoring of results is essential. Just remember the one golden rule of adverts - don’t sacrifice your conversion rate in order to improve your click through rate, unless you are very sure that you know what you’re doing. Consider the following advert, that’s working quite well:

Televisions
All The Information You Need
Choose With Confidence
www.televisions.com

Its producing the following stats

Impressions: 10,000
Clicks: 500
Conversions: 25
Cost Per Click: £0.30
Profit Per Conv: £300
Total Profit: £6000

Now you decide to try a new advert, to try and improve your conversion rate.

Cheap Televisions
Lowest Prices On The Internet
Amazing Range, Fast Delivery
www.televisions.com

It produces the following stats

Impressions: 10,000
Clicks: 1000
Conversions: 26
Cost Per Click: £0.30
Profit Per Conv: £300
Total Profit: £4800

Here you have increased your CTR from 5%-10% GREAT, but wait your conversion rate has fallen from 5% - 2.6%, and lost about 20% of your income so the change didn't work. Why? Because you changed your niche by using the word cheap and then people didn't find you cheap so less people brought!

So, I’d suggest that you look at changing the target for your adverts only very occasionally. The rest of the time, you should just look to improve the click through rate, being careful that you aren’t drawing in a different type of customer.

In summary, be very careful when trying words like “Cheap”, “Quality” - they will change the type of people clicking on your advert, and you’ll need to be much more careful when analysing the results.

Creating a good advert is getting into the mindset of your customer and then calling them to click. The landing page then needs to deliver on the promises of the advert in order to get a good conversion rate. you can make a much larger profit by improving the conversion rate of your landing page than by increasing your CTR.

There are plenty of great books on the subject so read some to develop your knowledge further.

• Search Engine Optimization - How important?
• Coverting A Website To A Site Which Converts
• Pay per click - Google sponsored Links
• Adwords PPC Campaign management
• Letting Agents Web design
• AdWords Conversion Tracking