Google Copywriting 101

Posted by Richard Stokes on March 28, 2006 to

There is plenty of generic advice you can find about search engine advertising on the net. Some is good. Some is just plain wrong. To be successful, you'll have to sort it out for yourself, but you won't be able to do it until you know the cardinal rule of Google advertising...

Be Unique

Successful advertising in large part depends on effectively differentiating yourself from the competition. Ideally, your products would be different, your customers whould be different, your advertising strategy whould be different, and when advertising on a search engine, your chosen keywords whould be different. Of course, it's not usually possible to differentiate on all fronts from competitors, but it's fairly easy to differentiate in one or two ways.

The more points of overlap with competitors, the less you'll sell and the more time and money you'll waste.

It's not enough to follow standard copywriting guidelines, even the ones we have here. It is most important to monitor what your competitors are doing and continually adjust your campaign.

The Prime Directive: Be different. If too many others are targeting your keywords, look elsewhere. If your ads look like all of your competitors, change them – even if doing so violates a copywriting guideline.

With that out of the way, here are the basics...

You have very limited space:

25 characters for the headline.
35 characters each for two lines of copy.
A display URL (which doesn't have to match the clickthrough URL)

That’s all you have to work with. It makes it harder to write an ad, but it makes it easier to write a concise one. Abraham Lincoln said something to the effect of, “If you want a a two hour speech, I can give you one right now. But if you want a twenty minute one, it’ll take two weeks”. The point of this is that it is a lot of work to condense your message down into such a short space. But because so few people do so, there's plenty of advantage to be gained by expending the effort.

Geographic Targeting

Advertising is only as effective as its targeting. The more you customize the message to the audience, the more relevant it will be to them. Make sure you target the right language and the right country for each ad. This seems obvious, but it many Google advertisers ignore it. I'm willing to bet they have very poor CTRs to show for their work.

We've also seen a trend towards regional and city targeting. Google now will award placement boosts to advertisers on a regional basis. In theory, this seems like a good idea. But it is usually impractical for advertisers to write separate ads for every region in the country in an effort to boost regional CTRs.

Keyword Targeting

Here's where you earn your money in online advertising.

Rule: Avoid broad keywords

Broad keywords appeal to a wide audience, but they suffer from the disadvantage that it is impossible to adjust ad copy based on searcher behavior. Is the person who typed in "spyware" looking to buy a product, learn what spyware is, or learn how to write spyware? There's no way to tell, and that's why conversion rates are so low for this keyword. Conversely, traffic is very high, so you end up spending a disproportionate amount of your ad budget to generate relatively few sales.

Broad keywords also suffer from low clickthrough rates. We recently ran test advertisements on the “shareware” for Google. Our ad produced a single click in about 1700 impressions and was quickly disabled. Is this a big deal? You bet - the two factors of high volume and low CTR deliver a double whammy to your historical stats, dragging your entire campaign down.

The right way to target keywords is to invest time and money into keyword expansion. Your campaign should ideally consist of a minimum of tens of thousands of keyword phrases. And if you must use broad keywords, you should also be making liberal use of negatives to remove longer, non-performing keyword phrases that your ads will inevitably appear in.

Another helpful refinement on targeting keywords is use brackets to get stricter matches when you enter your keywords. Example: "[write a google ad]".

This is very useful when you are trying to target “software marketing” and not “marketing software”. These phrases mean very different things (the first might refer to how to promote a technology business, while the second probably refers to business planning software.)

The value of learning

A small company doesn’t have the resources to perform extensive marketing research, copy tests, etc. Thus it becomes important to maximize the learning of each experiment. This is how many small, local retailers refine their advertising campaigns, and it's most likely how you should, too.

Always test at least two ads simultaneously. This will tell you conclusively that one ad is more effective than the others over the same time period. Unlike many forms of promotion, online ads have a straightforward measure: Click Through Rate (CTR). Google will disable your ad if it falls below .4% CTR, so they enforce a certain degree of learning on you. But there’s no need to stop there – keep experimenting after every thousand or so impressions.

Our top ad today is producing a 3.2% CTR in an extremely crowded keyword. Average CPC (cost per click): $0.12. How did we do it? Careful side-by-side testing of multiple ads performed over a sufficient length of time.

These are the basic strategic rules. In Google Copywriting 102, we'll cover some basic tactical techniques.