The Maine SEO Blog

Create ad and keywords: Create an ad

Now that you’ve got your advanced settings all in order, it’s finally time to create your first ad!

First things first: you can create a variety of ads in AdWords: text, image, video, or mobile. Each has a variety of techniques, and I’m only going to go over the text ad, as it’s the most popular.

You’ll see five lines of text in the ad manager:

1. Headline: The blue hyperlink to your landing page; total of 25 characters.
2. Description Line 1: 1st line of black text; total of 35 characters.
3. Description Line 2: 2nd line of black text; total of 35 characters.
4. Display URL: The green text displaying your landing page; total of 35 characters.
5. Destination URL: The actual destination landing page (that must match the display URL domain); total of 1024 characters.

The wrong way to write an ad

Below is an example of how not to write an ad. It’s vague, not overly enticing, and most importantly: there’s no call to action!

The right way to write ad

Here are some of the pointers Google AdWords Help gives for optimizing your ads:

• Make your ad simple and enticing.
• Have a sale or promotion? Include it! Free shipping – add it! Price, as we all know, is a huge differentiator.
• Call-to-action. Have one. ‘Nuff said.
• Include the keywords you’re bidding on in the text.
• Choose the best destination URL – more often than not, it won’t be the homepage.
• Test multiple ads. You might be surprised about which one performs better.

With a purpose in mind, I set out to try again:

Remember: you’ll want to have tested the keywords you use in the ad beforehand (which I haven’t with this example), but you get the idea.

Congratulations!

You’ve created your first ad! Tomorrow, we start on keywords.

Nicki Hicks
Puppy Presents on the Brain

Tags: AdWords, keywords

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 11:01 am and is filed under Paid Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.