Writing Effective Ads

Find the message that clicks with customers

This is an abridged excerpt from the Smart Start guide, which is packed with helpful content to assist you in making your campaigns as effective as possible. Whether you’re an expert search marketer or just starting out, these tips from Yahoo!’s Sharon Goodsense offer practical search marketing insights. Download Smart Start.

When creating ads, there are several things you can do to help get more clicks.

Write the best ad text you can

• Be precise in describing what you offer. Ads that are not well written or are unclear do not perform well.
• Make your ads concise and factual. Ads that are too salesy might repel, not attract.
• Don’t use ampersands (&) and numbers in place of words. These symbols can make your ad look unprofessional.
• Provide a strong call-to-action. If your business provides something unique, make sure to include that in your ad.

Use the insert keyword feature

You probably wouldn’t click an ad that didn’t mention what you were searching for—and neither will your customers. Research shows that people are more likely to click if the keyword appears in the ad’s title or description. To use the feature, click the insert keyword link at the place in your ad’s title or description where you would like your keyword to appear. When a prospective customer searches for one of your keywords, the system will insert the appropriate keyword into your title or description in bold type—reassuring searchers that your ad matches their search.

Make sure your landing page is consistent with your ad

If you send searchers to a web page that doesn’t include what they searched for, this makes for a bad customer experience, which can have a negative impact on your conversion rate. For best results, focus on the customer, not your company.

Use ad testing

Testing ad messages is the mark of a smart advertiser—so we make it easy for you to do just that! If you can write an ad, you can use ad testing. All you need to do is create more than one ad in an ad group. Each of the ads that you created will be rotated in search results when searchers type in keywords from that ad group.

If you choose to use ad testing, the ad receiving the highest click-through rate will be shown more often in search results over time. This is because ad optimization is turned on in your account. (You can also set up ad optimization to show ads more frequently for other metrics, such as conversions or revenue.) If you prefer, you can also turn ad optimization off. But if you leave ad optimization on, you could see even more clicks to your web site, because your better ads will be shown more often. Eventually, this could improve your ad quality, which can improve your ad’s rank in search results. All steps in the right direction!

— The Smart Start guide