As we continue to shift how we set up our accounts, it’s important to ensure our ads are a reflection of our account structure. Ad copy and extension should be tailored to ensure our account structure is working to its fullest extent. We tend to place a large amount of focus on keyword research and account structure that ad copy can almost become an afterthought. However, because our ads are the final product they should carefully written, and extra attention should be paid to the extensions we use. Below are several approaches I use to help enhance my ad “real estate” and help personalize copy for customers in different phases of their journey.
Ad Copy
Typically, when writing ad copy, we tend to focus on adding keywords, a unique selling point, and a CTA (Call to Action). While these attributes are still very necessary these are attributes that mostly live in description lines. Your headlines are your most important asset to attract attention. Inserting ad customizers, a pain point, asking questions, or answering questions can help increase CTR (Click Through Rate).
In my ad copy I try to answer as much as possible “So what?” when writing my copy. For example, in my upper-funnel campaigns when users are in the research phase I try to answer, “So what questions are they asking, and can we provide them with the best answer?”. For lower-funnel campaigns, the copy is more geared towards brand authority/reputation and the differences between known competitors.
Ad Customizers
Using ad customizers can give us the ability to personalize ad copy to increase relevance to target audiences. Several customizers that have been successful for me have been location, price, and countdown.
In one account, which had several locations across one state, we were receiving a low amount of traffic through our geo-location ad groups that housed ads with locations within the copy. Knowing customers prefer to find a location that is closest to them, we decided to test location ad customizers in one of our campaigns. After running for two weeks, the ads with the location customizer had a 473% higher CTR and a 38% decrease in CPC.
Ad price customizers have come in handy when we’ve inserted them in our copy to price-sensitive customers who are in the research phase of their customer journey. By adding prices to ads we were able to better qualify users and decrease our costs. This type of ad customizer can be helpful when you have a large inventory with various price ranges.
The last ad customizer I’ve used is countdown. This one is most frequently used with short term promotions and is heavily used during the holiday season. This ad customizer had varying degrees of success in several eCommerce accounts, but it’s been most impactful in short term sales for products that rarely go on sale and tend to have high price points.
Sitelinks
The final touch is curating sitelinks for the customer journey, which can further help increase relevance and appeal to your audience. Since branded campaigns tend to be lower funnel, their sitelinks should be geared towards pages that can help push brand authority like awards/reviews, direct users to best-selling products, or towards your objective. Higher funnel campaigns can have sitelinks that answer questions users have during their research or consideration phase to help push them along the funnel. For example, if your product is electric toothbrushes you can have sitelinks that help answer “best electric toothbrush” with a guide listing your top features, and why people have switched to your brand (reviews). Your ad and sitelink copy should work together to visually attract and quickly fulfill a need.
