Adwords Tips – Reduce Your Ad Copy Clutter

PPC can be an expensive business, but if you are using paid ads inefficiently then you really are shooting yourself in the foot.
If you can engage potential customers with succinct ad copy then you will earn more clicks and conversions. Conversely if an ad is overburdened by copy then it is just as likely that users will be confused by it, or ignore it altogether.
You can improve AdWords performance by addressing the clutter issues that may be compromising your click-through rates (CTR). Here are some examples as to why simplification is such an effective tactic, together with a few AdWords tips to help you save a campaign from languishing in obscurity.

Getting the Scent

An ad should allow a user to predict precisely what they will encounter when they click through to a landing page. So, your copy must be honed with this in mind. If not, those who visit your site are more likely to be dissatisfied with what they find, leading to a significant spike in bounce rates – and no incremental revenue. Obvious? Perhaps, but I encounter far too many campaigns which fail to take it into account.

Pushing and Pulling to Improve AdWords Performance

Paid ads should pull in paying customers; why else would you run them? But it is just as important to repel those who are outside of your target audience as this will ensure that your conversion rate is optimised. A high CTR is of absolutely no use to anyone if it doesn’t drive equally high sales.
Including a call to action in the copy can really help; it will make the purpose of the landing page far more explicit from the outset. You can also adjust the tone of the copy, the vocabulary used and even the syntax to attract the money traffic and deter those expensive tyre-kickers and frustration clickers. Think about what each group is looking for. Will they find it? Now write the copy.

Concise and Clean

While it may sometimes seem implausible that you can improve AdWords performance when working with such stupidly short copy, you need only look at your more successful competitors’ PPC ads on Google to see which are eye catching and appealing and which have all the appeal of a brown envelope from HMRC.
Ads which have a clean appearance, uncluttered by punctuation, symbols and other textual detritus, are easier for users to absorb. And if you want to make a site and brand more memorable, cutting to the chase with concise copy is a must.
If a PPC ad cannot express its purpose in under 10 words (ideally under 5), then browsers with gnat-like concentration spans will simply move onto a competitor’s more succinct ad. Much the same can be said for your value proposition. The 20 seconds you may have to sell to a CEO in a lift is positively generous in comparison with the attention span of your average browser.
Getting the balance right will require experimentation and testing, but a leaner, meaner approach is usually the best route to AdWords success.