While there are many elements involved in a successful Google AdWords campaign, your ad content plays a significant role in influencing consumers to click and continue on to purchase.
Before you create your next AdWords campaign, use these hacks to improve your ad copy for higher conversions:
1. Speak Directly to the Audience
One of the best ways to connect with your target audience is by speaking directly to them using specific language that addresses their needs and challenges. Using pronouns like “you” and “your” in your ad copy can help make your audience feel like they are a part of the conversation. By including content that speaks to their biggest challenges, you are helping to build a connection with the user that encourages them to click on the ad.
The purpose of your ad is to provide a solution to your audience’s biggest challenges or fulfill a need. As such, you should use direct language to tell them just how your products or services help satisfy that need or address that challenge. For example, you might say, “Reserve your spot now” or “You can start feeling better today” to show how your product or service offering can directly impact the consumer.
2. Try Asking a Question
Using questions in your Google ads is a great way to pique the user’s interest and connect with them. When it comes to ad headlines, a question is more interactive than a statement and can go a long way in getting the user to click on the ad to see what your brand has to offer. This tactic is especially helpful for ad campaigns that are targeting top of the funnel consumers and aim to build brand awareness.
Check out this example from MarketingExperiments.com that compares two AdWords headlines. The control ad uses a question as the headline (“Need Website Content?”) while the second ad headline uses a declarative statement (“Web Content Make Money”). In this test, the control ad that used the question as a headline outperformed the ad with the statement headline by over 36%. In this case, the question in the headline appeals to the user’s needs or challenges.
3. Create a Sense of Urgency
For the most part, search engine users are not looking for something that they need as soon as possible. Instead, many searchers take time to do some research and compare products and pricing before making a purchasing decision. This makes it a little tricky when it comes to Google AdWords conversions. If you want more consumers to convert on the spot, you will need to communicate a sense of urgency that appeals to their fear of missing out, or FOMO. In fact, one research study shows that even adding even a small sense of urgency to your ad copy can increase product revenue by 27%.
There are a few ways that you can create this sense of urgency in your ad copy. One way is to advertise a limited quantity or an impending expiration date for a specific promotion. This creates a deadline in the consumer’s mind that will help generate a fear of missing out and encourage them to act sooner rather than later. For example, a consumer may be more inclined to act immediately on a 40% off promotion that ends tomorrow than a deal that has no expiration date.
4. Go Hyper Local With Your AdWords Copy
Going local with your Google ads doesn’t just apply to targeting. It also impacts the way that you develop your AdWords copy. Consumers who are looking for local brands will type different queries into the search engines to find what they are looking for. Though you cannot influence the way that these users search for products, you can respond to their actions by developing ad copy that emphasizes hyper local search phrases.
To take advantage of local traffic, you will want to use location qualifiers in your ad content. For instance, if you are a real estate attorney in Tampa, Florida, you might include the word “Tampa” in your headline along with other relevant keywords such as “real estate attorney” or “real estate lawyer.” You can also work location qualifiers into the expanded headline section of your ads. This can help you attract more local traffic to your business.
5. Use Specific (and Verifiable) Numbers
Consumers love numbers, but only if they are verifiable. For instance, while a consumer may not believe that a restaurant is “world famous” or a film is the “#1 film of the year,” they will respond to exact numbers and statistics that are accurate and can be verified. While “world’s best” cannot be verified, “98.5% satisfaction rate” can. The more specific and accurate your numbers, the more likely you are to attract your target audience.
We’ve already discussed how the best headlines are very specific. One of the best ways to ensure that your headline is specific is by including exact numbers. In fact, according to the Negotiation Experts, people are more likely to believe exact numbers than those that have been rounded up. You can use numbers to show the visitor percentages, statistics, prices, or even quantity to make a point about your products or services.
6. Include a Clear Call-to-Action (CTA)
It’s no secret that most people who are online right now are a bit distracted. Think about how many times a day you have multiple browser tabs open or how often you find yourself watching cat video after cat video on YouTube when you started off with a simple Google search for something work related. It is easy for people to get distracted on the internet, and this presents a challenge for brands who are trying to reach their target audience through Google ads. If you want to get people to focus on your ads long enough to click, you will need to use clear language that tells them exactly what you want them to do.
We’ve already talked a little bit about using specific words and numbers to encourage conversions. But what about action-oriented words and phrases? This is where your CTA comes into play. If you want to get the attention of your busy online audience, you need to use action-oriented words that speak directly to the consumer’s needs as well as their fear of missing out.
Carefully choose words for your call-to-action that guide the reader to the next step, such as “sign up” or “register.” For best results, combine these action-oriented words with keywords (“Register for Team-Building Workshop”); promotions (“Save 40% when you sign up today”); or phrasing that creates a sense of urgency (“Sign up now before it’s too late!”).
7. Test Your AdWords Copy
Though testing your ad copy may not exactly qualify as a “hack,” it is a vital part of improving your AdWords conversions. Over time, things change, and you will need to be ahead of those changes if you want to get the most out of your AdWords spend. Whether your target audience has shifted or Google has made some changes to ad formatting, you can keep your ad copy dynamic by testing to see what works and what doesn’t.
One of the easiest ways to get started with ad copy testing is by running two ads in the same campaign and changing up the copy slightly in each. Wait a little while to allow your ads to get clicks and conversions, then evaluate the performance of each ad. You can test headlines, ad copy, and even offers to see which have the highest conversion rates among your audience. Once you have determined what works, adjust your ad content strategy to include these conversion-boosting ad elements.
