Tips for Better Pay Per Click PPC Ads

When it comes to pay-per-click advertising, there are two ways to decrease your spending. You can lower your cost per click (which will lower your position and your CTR) or you can improve your ads (which will increase your CTR and your position). Great ads will attract more clicks for a given amount of impressions, which will be rewarded by Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing with lower bid prices or higher rankings.

The real secret to writing “the best ad on the page” is to ruthlessly test and track multiple ads over multiple test iterations. By doing this, you will improve your ad over time, and will eventually have a great performing ad with a very high click through rate.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a few tips you could use to give your initial ads a boost, or to help you beat your personal best performing ad time and time again. So without further ado, here are 18 tips for writing better PPC ads:

1. Write ads for small groups of keywords. By grouping your keywords very tightly, and writing your ads specifically for those keywords, you will give yourself a large advantage over your competition. Many people are too lazy to take the time required to do this properly, yet it is something that will increase your CTR every single time.
2. Work your keywords into the ads as much as possible. If you took the advice from the previous tip, you will have an easier time with this one. You should try to get your keywords to appear multiple times in your ad so that you can take full advantage of keyword bolding. I sometimes include the keyword in all four lines of the PPC ad for maximum bolding.
3. Give the ads some visual appeal. This takes some additional creativity and planning, but can really help your ad to stand out. You can make each line progressively longer (or shorter) for a cascading effect, you can alternate lengths to create a visual “arrow” or “reverse arrow” shape within your ad, or you can make your ad intentionally extra short. All of these will help you ad differentiate itself from the competition and will hopefully attract some eyeballs.
4. Write ads with your audience in mind. When you are writing an ad, think to yourself “what is my audience looking for when they search for this keyword?” If you can “read their minds” and guess their internal dialog, you will be able to answer their exact questions and get their attention. This is another tip that is immensely easier if you group your keywords very tightly.
5. Create an attention-grabbing headline. Nothing in your ad is more important that your headline. The problem with PPC ads is that you don’t get much space for it (25 characters with AdWords). Craft your headline wisely, but don’t stress over it too much, you will probably be split testing many, many different variations before you find the great ones.
6. Ask the audience a question. This is definitely a good strategy for certain markets. If you can work a question into your headline or description, test it out and see how it impacts the CTR. If someone is searching for something, and then you confirm what they are searching for, they are likely to click on your ad. Additionally, the tone of the question, along with the question mark, helps differentiate your ad from the others.
7. Use specific numbers. This is a common copywriting trick that has been used for decades. Numbers create interest and specific numbers create curiosity. They won’t always perform better, but try to test the impact of including numbers in your ad. If you can, include a very specific number such as “314″ instead of “300+” or “76.83%” instead of “75%”. You don’t have to be 100% accurate with the numbers either, as long as you aren’t blatantly lying.
8. Capitalize strategically. It is better to capitalize the first letter of every word? The first letter of important words? Just the first letter of words in the headline? Should you capitalize words in your display URL? You can never be sure until you have tested it, but it is something that you must test. I usually start out capitalizing everything, then try out any combinations I can think of.
9. Borrow ideas from others. Another copywriting principle that has been in practice for decades is borrowing ideas from other ads. Although you should technically only take “ideas” (such as rewriting an ad about “pens” to work with your “cheese” keywords), you won’t get into any trouble copying direct competitors. Take some of the top (or your favorite) ads that are being shown for your keywords and mix them up to create something new. It they are at the top of the listings, they probably have a pretty good ad (or are paying out the nose).
10. Emphasize the benefits of your offer. Yet another age-old copywriting principle. Your audience doesn’t care how many features your are offering or how great they are, they want to know “What’s in it for me?” If you can tell them, in your ad, what benefit they will get from giving you their click, you will likely have a successful ad.
11. Use words that evoke emotion. If you can effectively get people to feel emotions when reading your ad, they will probably feel compelled to click it. The list of emotion words goes on and on, so here is a nice guide to emotion words.
12. Test multiple versions of your display URL. This was touched on in tip number 8, but needs to be expanded. While you should experiment with capitalization (i.e. “DomainName.com” vs “domainname.com”), you should also experiment with “www”, sub domains, and pages. It usually, but not always, increases the CTR when you include the keywords in your URL. You can essentially do this one of two ways: “Key-Words.DomainName.com” or “DomainName.com/Key-Words.” Although some uptight editors might disable these ads if the pages don’t actually exist, you can resubmit them and a nicer editor will realize that there is no harm done.
13. Be cautious with prices. Although prices do have their place as negative qualifiers, they will usually be detrimental to your CTR. Unless your price is the lowest, it is probably best to leave it out of your ad. You can, instead, state the savings as a benefit to the user.
14. Include a call-to-action. Sometimes, the most effective way to get someone to do something is to simply ask them to do it. That’s the principle behind the call to action. Because you have such limited space in a PPC ad, the call-to-action might not be beneficial, but is is at least worth a test. Just including something like “Click here to receive this benefit” is sufficient.
15. Double check spelling and grammar. This might seem obvious, but is can very easy to make a stupid mistake. Having a grammatical or spelling error in your ad hurts the credibility of your ad and will most likely get it disable by an editor, costing you valuable testing time.
16. Don’t waste space with useless words. Like I said before, the space available to you in a pay-per-click ad is extremely limited. Although your ads should be grammatically correct, they do not need to be sophisticated sentences. Keep them simply and concise so that it is easier for the reader to quickly understand what you are offering.
17. Use negative keywords. This isn’t directly related to actually writing your ads, but it is definitely important. It goes along with tip number 1. If you don’t use negative keywords, your ad is going to be triggered by keywords that you didn’t intend for. When this happens, your ad will not match what the consumer was searching for, they will not click your ad, and your CTR will suffer.
18. Make the ad relevant to the landing page. I saved this suggestion for last because it will not effect the CTR of your ad in the least bit (it can, however, effect your landing page quality score). With that being said, it is still very important that you make your ad relevant to the landing page. If a visitor reads a particular offer or benefit in your ad, they are expecting to find it when they click through. Give them what you promised in your ad and you will experience higher conversions. Give them something that doesn’t match the ad and you will have a lot of confused visitors who reach for the back button.

There you have it, eighteen tips I have learned through my experience with PPC marketing. Keep in mind that these are merely suggestions, they can’t possibly be used all at once, and they won’t always make for a better ad. You need to test every change you make to your ads to determine if it has a positive or negative overall effect.

PPC Tricks and Tips

PPC can be a minefield, creating as many problems as it solves – especially if money is an issue. PPC can get very expensive very quickly.

Here are some tricks and tips:

Don’t use any words that could be considered trademarked, such as “McDonald’s” or “ToysRUs.” In many cases, these phrases will result in your account being suspended. Even worse, you could find yourself in a bit of legal hot water – companies like these take their trademarks very seriously, and do not take kindly to people who use them for their own purposes. If for some reason you need to use a trademarked word or phrase, do yourself a favor and get permission before you use it.

Be wary of the promises you make. People are motivated by promises of free stuff beyond, but oftentimes that motivation only goes so far. If you offer something for free, chances are you’ll get lots of click-throughs, but most will only be people in search of something for nothing, which doesn’t do your business any good. In fact, it will cost you money because you have to pay for the fact that they clicked on your ad. If you don’t make such promises up front, you may get fewer click-throughs, but the people who do click on your ad will more likely be serious buyers.

As mentioned above, it’s imperative that you create destination pages. But that job doesn’t stop once the page is created. Periodically check your conversion rates for each page, and if you find that one is suffering much worse than another, change it up. Just as it is important to change the order of your words in your ad campaign, changing your destination pages will help you optimize your conversion rate.

PPC, then, can be an inexpensive easy way to drive traffic to your site, but it can easily get out of hand. Make sure you crunch the numbers are bid according to how much you can actually afford while still potentially making a profit. It won’t do you any good to big so high that your site is ranked first if you can’t afford to sell your product at a rate that will still garner you a profit. Stay on top of things!

Tips For Cost Effective Pay Per Click Advertising

Pay per click advertising is one of the fastest ways to targeting prospective customers to your business products or services. A website can contract with one of the search engines, such as Google, Yahoo! or MSN and bid on keywords. When a person using the search engine enters one of the keywords in the search box, their ad pops up on the search results page as a sponsored ad. Here are some tips to make sure your ad is seen above your competition.

Know Your Niche
Knowing your niche when it comes to pay per click advertising involves knowing what search terms surfers are most likely to type into an internet search engine when looking for a site such as yours. Coming up with as many phrases that describe your website or your product or service is your most handy tool. With this basic list of keywords that describe your niche market you can then proceed to use the internet to help you find more words or phrases that you might not have thought of to add to your list. You can also find derivatives of the main words you thought up to give you a broader scope of keywords to bid on. To find free tools to use online to assist you simply type in “keyword too” into any search engine.

Pick Low Competition Keywords
The world of pay per click advertising is very competitive and the words you might want to bid on can be out of your budget. The key is to find the low competition variations of your main keyword that are less popular and therefore will cost less. The best tool one can have when looking for low competition keywords in their niche is a keyword analyzer software which can be purchased or found for free online. Some keywords tools are very good for doing pay per click research because they not only give you a list of alternatives for any search word you enter, they will also display the number of searches for that keyword and the number of campaigns already running for the keyword phrase you entered. This gives you a good view of what words you can bid on without going over budget, and also allows you to find keywords to bid on that are uncharted, meaning they get a good number of monthly searches but there are no campaigns running for that keyword. Without a keyword analyzer tool you can also find out how many campaigns are running for any keyword by simply typing the word into in the search engine and counting the ads.

Write Engaging Ads
Pay per click ads are typically less than 125 characters. You don’t get lots of ad space to sell, so the object is to get into your customers head and ask yourself how they will benefit from your product or service. Listing a benefit in the form a question is a good way to engage those who view your ads. Some search engines such as Google allow you to score points through relevancy to search terms. Meaning the more relevant your ad is, based on how many times it is view verses how many it is clicked, the higher your ad will be on the list of ads bidding for that keyword. Using your main keyword in the title of the ad and in the ad itself will show your ad as having the exact phase that surfer searched for and thus increases the likeliness that they will click through to your web page.

Test Your Ads
Once you’ve written an add and included the keywords you’d like to bid on, your next step is to write a different ad and run it along side your first ad to test which one gets more click through’s or sales. Once you’ve found this out, write another one and try and beat your previous stats. This will eventually lead to you having the best ads possible. Most pay per click companies will allow you to run two ads simultaneously, sharing the account funds to each and displaying each ad the same number of times.

Once you have a few pay per click campaigns under your belt this system for choosing the right keywords and creating relevant ads will become routine. Done the right way pay per click advertising can be a very cost effective way to promote any online venture you are involved in.

PPC

Pay Per Click or PPC is a contemporary method of paid advertising where websites can directly place them in the top search pages. Here the businesses bid to be placed in or after the first page (only when the first page is already full). In PPC a company has to pay a certain amount to the search engine, for each click by the visitor. You can easily identify the PPCs in your search engines. Many popular search engines have PPCs as ‘Sponsored Links’ or ‘Featured Links’ listed on the right side of the search pages. Google has named these PPCs as Adwords which were previously recognized as Overture results.

Why PPC?

PPC is the most hassle free way of advertising. It’s the most noticeable way of advertising. PPC campaigns can help your website featuring in the top page of search engines. PPC can be called the paid version of standard SEO campaigns. PPC gives instant results like gathering traffic while it takes months to standard SEO campaigns to get listed in the first page. PPC is very easy and you don’t require any special knowledge as compared to SEO campaigns. All you need is proper keywords for your PPC for magical results.

Limitations of PPC

PPC like any other form of advertisement has some limitations. The following are the few limitations of PPC,

• Everything depends on bidding in PPC. If you can raise your bid you can attain the top position in search pages
• It’s sometimes very expensive. The cost depends on the competitiveness of your keyword and phrases
• You can’t monitor your position in PPC. If any firm bids more than your bid then it might obtain your position.

How it works?

PPC has now become an easiest way to advertise in search engines. It’s an effective way to list your website in major search engines. If you are planning to conduct a PPC then here are golden rules to be followed. Make sure you know every tit-bit of your PPC campaign; after all it’s about your hard earned money honey.

• Worth-while

Determine the worth of your visitors. In PPC you spend every buck to generate traffic. If your PPC costs more than your business gained then it’s certainly a big failure. You should decide your bidding according to the desired profit. Bidding expense depends on the popularity of your key phrase. Hence it’s wise to pay less if you have a less competitive key phrase.

• Key Phrases

Like typical SEO campaigns, PPC also needs an in depth keywords research. Keyword research is an imperative part of a successful PPC campaign. There aren’t any particular set of keywords but it’s wise to have a collection of most relevant keywords for your PPC.

• Descriptions

Your description can entice your visitors to hit your website. in PPC you don’t require only visitors but you need businesses and customers to hit you as you can’t pay for mere wanderers. Try to incorporate marketing copy writing in your description. This can enhance your description and attract more customers. Be lucid and tell what you want to say about you. Your description should be word description of your business.

• Analysis

As I have mentioned earlier, you can’t monitor your campaign success regularly. Because of bidding your position might change everyday. Try to track the effectiveness of your keyword phrases intermittently. View click-through rates and study the visitor trends for a successful PPC campaign.