Advert Text

Advert text seems to come up in just about every section, doesn’t it! Don’t worry, I’ll put everything together later – it’ll be a lot easier than you having to bounce backwards and forwards every time you want to read up on it.

In this instance, I’m looking at advert text from the perspective of maximising the Quality Scores.

It’s actually quite simple, in principle. Google wants to see the search term, or at the very least, part of the search term, in the advert – Ideally, in the title.

The catch?

The adverts are written at Adgroup level, remember? Therefore, you have to be very careful how you group your keywords – it’s not enough just to have keywords that mean the same grouped together, they need common words in them, if possible.

At one extreme, you could put every single keyword in its own Adgroup. This would certainly give you the opportunity to target your adverts very well from a Quality Score perspective. However, when the time comes to analyse how your campaign is performing, it makes things quite difficult. And it also makes optimising the long-tail more difficult, since the keywords haven’t been grouped together, and as a result can’t be analysed together (without a fair bit of work).

So your keywords should be grouped not just on the sort of keyword they are, but also the actual words within them.

Now it’s not always possible to do this – if your keyword is more than 25 characters long, then you can’t put it in the title, and if it’s more than 35 characters long, it won’t fit anywhere. Just do the best you can.

It’s worth noting here that you may run into another catch-22 situation here. You want to put your keywords in the title of your advert, but you also want your advert to stand out. What if everyone else already has that term in their title?

If your competitors are rank amateurs, who don’t really know how Adwords works, it’s not likely to be a major problem, but try running a Google search for “PPC Management”! You can bet that most of these guys know the score! At the moment, I’m seeing the following titles:

Google search for ˜PPC Management’

Which one stands out? The one with the lowest Quality Score! But they might well be making a lot of ground up with a good click through rate, and they have PPC in the second line, so perhaps they are ‘winning’ at the moment…

In this instance, it may not matter too much, as most people looking for an advertising agency would click on every link on the page (I think. I would, anyway).

There’s no ‘right’ answer to this one – but personally, I’d recommend improving the clickthrough rate. Test it yourself, and see what happens…

Page last updated by Steve Baker on May 11, 2008 at 7:09 pm.

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6 Responses to “Advert Text”

  1. Louis Winthorpe III

    Hi again Steve. I’ve been religiously including my keyword in the advert title of my advert (I have one keyword for each adgroup) as well as the word ‘professional’ or ‘expert’ in the first line of the advert. However, I am not getting very many ‘Great’ adverts, mostly ‘OK’ and a few ‘Poor’ no matter what I do. It is annoying when one advert is ‘Great’ and with the same advert text (just with a different keyword in the title) it goes to ‘OK’. Unfortunately in the UK system as well there is no way of doing a report on ‘Great’ adverts, ‘Good’ adverts etc. etc. unless yet again I’m missing something?

    This is a superb resource by the way, keep up the hard work!

  2. Steve Baker

    Hi again,

    The advert text is only one of the attributes that counts towards your Minimum Bid Quality Score. What sort of clickthrough rates are you getting (and what position are your adverts appearing in)?

    The relevance of your landing page for different keywords may vary a bit as well.

  3. Louis Winthorpe III

    Hi Steve,

    Here are my stats so far for August. Hope it lines up right!

    Clicks Imp. CTR
    Campaign #1 $6.00 / day 38 4,687 0.81%
    Campaign #2 $6.00 / day 41 5,320 0.77%
    Campaign #3 $6.00 / day 27 4,730 0.57%
    Campaign #4 $6.00 / day 53 5,106 1.03%
    Campaign #5 $5.00 / day 40 2,947 1.35%

    Each campaign has approx 50 – 80 adverts each with 1X broad, phrase, exact keyword in.

    Average Positions>
    Campaign 1 – 13.4
    Campaign 2 – 10.5
    Campaign 3 – 8.1
    Campaign 4 – 10.1
    Campaign 5 – 7.9

    I am in a competitive niche (property-related) and click costs can be very high. My max click at the moment is $1.50 (which is cheap but I know I’m going to have to up it soon).

    Thanks for your time Steve.

  4. Steve Baker

    Assuming that the figures are for the search network only, the clickthrough rates given the positions are about what I’d expect for keywords rated as ‘Good’.

    It’s always a bit tricky when your advert position is in the range of about 9 – 12 as the adverts sometimes appear at the bottom of page one, and sometimes as the top of page two – this can have a major bearing on the clickthrough rate, so it’s difficult to comment with any confidence.

    For the other two campaigns (3 and 5), 3 is getting a ctr of 0.6% from 8th, which isn’t very good, and 5 is getting a ctr of 1.4% from 8th, which is quite acceptable.

    I’d look at the advert text on campaign 3 – people are seeing your advert, but not clicking on it.

    Campaign 5 has a reasonable clickthrough rate – but it can always be better.

    Without seeing your adverts, it’s difficult, but I’d suggest that your adverts may have one of two problems – either they aren’t catching the eye (they’re boring, or blend in to the others), or they aren’t convincing the searcher that you have what they are looking for. Put yourself in the searchers position, and run their search (on AdPreview). See why they aren’t clicking on your advert.

  5. Louis Winthorpe III

    Thanks for these excellent pointers Steve. I hadn’t really sussed that Campaign 3 was looking so poor so will analyse this first. I’m going to look at each keyword and try some new adverts on the worst performing, if they don’t work out I’ll get shot of them. I’ve always found that the only way to see if an advert will be ‘Great’ is to create a new advert until I get it to be ‘Great’. I will certainly look at the text from my other Great adverts and see what I can come up with. Thanks again for the help.

  6. Steve Baker

    It’s performing poorly with regards to the clickthrough rate.

    Just make sure that you don’t sacrifice the conversion rate when you re-write it. If you’re paying for every visitor to your site, you need to target the ones who are likely to convert.

    Good luck,

    Steve

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