Welcome to absorbing.com – the home of Absorb Digital services

Before you write your Google PPC ads, remember you have an audience of billions and think how your ads are going to be judged – bad ads can do serious damage to your brand.

When I worked at Google as a PPC specialist, Account Managers at planning agencies representing heavyweight brands constantly telephoned me to ask if I could make their ads better. Often, they used the word ‘sexy’.

‘Paul, Nokia have just spoken to us and they don’t think their ads are sexy enough to get lots of clicks – can your write new ones please, make them a bit sexier?’

Or:

‘Can you sex-up the ads a bit on the Norwich Union account, our CTR isn’t great and we think we need sexier ads.’

My reply was always the same:

‘You don’t need sexier ads, you need better planning.’

If you’re constantly worrying about ways to improve your ads then I’d be willing to bet good money that you’ve got your approach wrong.

I’d also wager on the fact that you’ve damaged your brand’s reputation.

In your quest to improve your ads you might have:

• Used puns: ‘Cheep bird cages’ – Puns are patronising.
• Used rhyming: ‘The best Parrot cages delivered on time/Discounts today when you shop online – Rhyming is very patronising.
• Used excessive punctuation! – If in doubt throw an exclamation mark at it! Right?! Wrong.
• Been overly creative and tried something daring; something experimentally off-piste – PPC ads and high creative concepts mix like oil and water.

What do all of the above devices have in common? They alienate you from your audience. Bad ads damage your brand because your target audience stops believing that you can give them what they want – even worse; your target audience is embarrassed by you.

Never resort to using any of the above devices. Instead, think like a Google user thinks and picture the kind of ads you click on when you search for things you want to buy on Google.

The best ads are practical. The best ads give users exactly what they’re looking for at the precise moment in time they’ve asked to see it.

That’s why if you’re constantly rewriting your ads to make them clever or sexy then you need to have a rethink.

Forget the ads for a minute and ask yourself why you’re always rewriting them. Usually, it’s because you’re not happy with your CTR.

But your CTR is only ever going to improve significantly if you make your ads more relevant to your audience – not more sexy.  Put your ads in front of more people you know want to see them and more people will click on them – it’s that simple.

The only way to make your ads more relevant is to change the structure of your campaigns. Get your structure right and your ads will more or less write themselves.

Let me give you an example:

An Account Manager at a large central London agency once contacted me in a panic because her most important client – one of the biggest mobile network operators in the UK – was underperforming and there was a danger her agency might lose the account.

The agency needed to take action quickly in order to bring the mobile network operator’s performance up to the same level as its competitors.

One of the things the Account Manager asked me was if I could write new ads.

‘I think we need new ads, ‘she said.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘Because our CTR is just so bad.’

‘I think you need a complete restructure,’ I said. ‘It won’t take me very long and once it’s finished I promise you that CTR will rocket.’

I was able to make this promise as I’d already taken a look at the campaigns and seen that the agency had set them up so badly that some basic strategic changes would make a huge difference.

After the restructure went live, performance improved overnight – the client was happy and the agency kept the account.

This is how simple it was to boost performance:

There were four campaigns: (1) Generic Terms (2) Contract Terms (3) Pay-As-You-Go-Terms (4) Brand Terms.

Each campaign contained just two ad groups: (1) A-M (2) N-Z. There were at least a thousand keywords in each ad group.

In other words, thousands of keywords had been dropped into each campaign and split into one of two ad groups depending on what letter of the alphabet the keyword term started with.

No amount of trying to write sexy ads would have made a difference to CTR because with such a broad theme of keywords all in one place it was impossible to give Google users the highly targeted ads that they’d grown accustomed to from savvier advertisers.

The solution? Look for themes within the large alphabetical ad groups and create lots of smaller ad groups based on actual Google search patterns.

To illustrate further, here are the new ad groups I created for the Generic Terms campaign:

mobile phones – generic

cheap phones

latest phones

retro phones

best phones

cool phones

bling phones

designer phone

pink phones

gold phones

music phones

flip phones

slide phones

email phones

fm radio phones

touch screen phones

bluetooth phones

thin phones

tri band phones

quad band phones

Now, try writing an ad against any of the above ad groups and you’re limited in what you can say – this is what I meant about ads that write themselves.

Being limited in what you can say is actually to your advantage. For example, the headline for the ‘touch screen’ ad group has to mention touch screen phones. So how about:

Touch Screen Phone Deals

As for the rest of your ad, you really should mention touch screen phones again – what else can you include in your ad copy when the theme of the keywords you’re targeting is so narrowly focussed? So:

Touch Screen Phone Deals

20% off touch screen phones when

you order online – Buy now

So, whenever a Google user enters a ‘touch screen’ related keyword term they trigger a highly targeted ad that gives them exactly what they’ve asked to see.

Now write similar ads for the other ad groups…

When you’re finished you’re left with dozens of different ads, all of which target a tightly themed set of keywords.

Or, looking at it from a different angle: No matter what mobile phone related keyword term out of a pool of thousands a Google user searches for, that user will be shown an ad that’s a very close match to what they’ve asked to see.

All of this adds up to stacks more relevance in the relationship between your ads and your audience – and more relevance equals a higher CTR and better performance.

So forget about sexy ads and instead think about your structure – get your structure right and by the time you sit down to write your ads the hard work has already been done.