Pay per click (PPC) is one of the best ways to advertise your site online. However, webmasters who know how to write good ppc ads are the ones who get the most traffic for their websites.

In this post I will give you some free tips for writing ppc ads.

Most visitors read ONLY the Title of the Ad and decide whether to click or not. So, you must ensure the Title of your ad is very effective. How can you make it effective?

One of the best ways to make it effective is to include your keyword in the Title of the Ad. There are two ways to do it.

1. Write the keyword be in your Title. The problem with this method is that it’s not feasible if you have hundreds of keywords that are names of different products offering the same kind of service. You may need to write hundreds of ads for hundreds of keywords.

Lets take an example. An online retailer of mobile phones may be selling mobiles of different companies at low rates. In the above scenario they may have to write different ads for each brand i.e. Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola, Sony Ericsson etc. Something like this:

Keyword: Nokia
Ad Title: Buy Nokia Mobile at Low Rates

Keyword: Samsung
Ad Title: Buy Samsung Mobile at Low Rates

Keyword: LG
Ad Title: Buy LG Mobile at Low Rates

Keyword: Motorola
Ad Title: Buy Motorola Mobile at Low Rates

Keyword: Sony Ericsson
Ad Title: Buy Sony Ericsson Mobile at Low Rates

Note that all the titles have similar text except the brand name. There is way to write ads where the keyword can be inserted in the ad text dynamically. This is the second way to insert keyword in the Ad Title.

2. Insert the keyword in the Ad Title dynamically. How to do it?
Lets take an example. Let the keywords be red, green, blue and white.

Dynamically inserting keyword in the Ad Title:

Get {Keyword: Red} for $10

When the keyword searched will be “red”, the Ad Title displayed will be:

Get Red for $10

When the keyword searched will be “green”, the Ad Title displayed will be:

Get Green for $10

When the keyword searched will be “blue”, the Ad Title displayed will be:

Get Blue for $10

When the keyword searched will be “white”, the Ad Title displayed will be:

Get White for $10

Note that only the keyword has been inserted dynamically, but the rest of the text remains exactly the same.

Please also note:

Buy {keyword:black and white} at low rates
will result in showing the keywords in lower case:
Buy black and white at low rates

Buy {Keyword:black and white} at low rates
will capitalize first character:
Buy Black and white at low rates

Buy {KeyWord:black and white} at low rates
will capitalize first character of all the words:
Buy Black And White at low rates

Buy {KEYWORD:black and white} at low rates
will show all characters in upper case (please refer terms and conditions of the pay per click search engine before trying this):
Buy BLACK AND WHITE at low rates

You must be thinking why you should insert the keyword in the title? The reason is obvious – when the Ad title contains the keyword a searcher is searching for, they think the site contains some info about the product or service they are looking for. So they click.

Another reason is that the search engines bold the text that matches the words searched for. This does a double whammy effect. The keywords present in the Ad Title plus its bold. Naturally these ads get more clicks.

NOTE: If possible include either dynamically or manually the keywords in your Ad Description too. This will help you to get even better click through rate (CTR).

Another good idea is to use words that describe action. For example – Get, Fast, Increase, Decrease, Create, Buy etc.

A sense of emergency too can help you to get more clicks and increase your ads click through rate. You can use words like Today, Now, Offer ends on x date, etc.

If you can offer a solution to the problem of the searcher, they are most likely to click on your ad.

For example:
Get a branded shirt under $50.
(Problem: Not enough money to buy a shirt above $50. Solution: a branded shirt within budget)

Reduce 10 kilos in 40 days or money back.
(Problem: Want to reduce weight. Solution: Will reduce weight, else money refunded)

Low cost personal loans – bad credit ok
(Problem: Want a low cost personal loan, but has a bad credit. Solution: Gets exactly what he/she wants)

These are some of the strategies that work for almost all pay per click ads. Remember that these are just tips for writing good ppc ads. Once you get down in the business of actually advertising your site through PPC, you will learn a lot through personal experience. There is no hard and fast rule of what will work and what will not, but the tips here will definitely help you to get started your ppc campaign in a good way.

I want to listen from you. I will be glad if you leave your comments.

Google AdWords is one of the best ways to advertise your business online. Why am I saying this?

There are many reasons why Google AdWords is one of the best pay per click advertising methods available online. Let’s discuss them one by one.

1. Wide Reach: According to Hitwise, Google’s search share neared 70 percent in June 2008 in the United States. It means if you choose Google as your advertising media you can reach 70% of people looking for products online in the United States. Mind it though this data is for the US, Google is the most used search engine worldwide too.

2. Great Content Network: Have you ever noticed “Ads by Google” in some of the webpages? These are Ads that Google displays of its advertisers in many millions of webpages across the World Wide Web in its network. If you have opted in to advertise in the content network, your ad will reach even a much wider audience.

3. Free and Great Keyword Tool: If you aren’t a SEO pro and don’t know how to research keywords for your business, don’t worry Google Keyword Tool can help you. Just go to Google Keyword Tool  and select “Website content” under “How would you like to generate keyword ideas?” (its a radio button) and enter your webpage URL in the space provided. Click on “Get keyword ideas”. Presto, Google will suggest you the keywords that can help you get targeted visitors to your site.

You can even enter your own keywords to get more keywords. For more on keyword research, read my article on how to do keyword research.

4. Great Conversions: I have been reading forums and blogs for many years now and am a Google Advertiser myself. Traffic from Google converts much more than from any other pay per click search engine. It means your cost per conversion will be low and you can bid more to get more traffic and sales from Google.

Disclaimer: This may not necessarily be true in all the cases. Some of the advertisers have seen better conversions from other search engines. I am just emphasizing the fact that in most cases Google converts better than any other search engine.

5. Quality Score determines Cost Per Click: This is a boon for small advertisers and even the big ones. If the quality score of a keyword is high, you pay less per click and the ad gets a better ad position, meaning more exposure for your ads.

NOTE: According to Google: Quality Score for minimum bid is determined by a keyword’s clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, the relevance of the keyword to its ad group, your landing page quality, your account’s historical performance, and other relevance factors. For more information on quality score please click here.

6. Ad Targeting by Location and Time: Google helps you to target your ad to precise audience. If you don’t want your ads to appear in certain parts/countries of the world, you can do so.

Another great feature of Adwords is that you can even set the time in the day when your ads will be shown. For example if you want to show your ads from 9am to 6pm, Monday to Friday only, you can do so. Your ads will not be shown on any other day and time. Not many pay per click search engines offer this kind of facility.

7. Zero Click Fraud: Click fraud is a major concern today with many pay per click search engines. Click fraud are clicks that are generated by robots / software or any other program where humans are not involved. They are generally useless and eat up a huge chunk of advertising dollars. Basically click fraud means your money is going down the drain.

So if you are getting 10 clicks out of which 4 or 5 are clicks not by real humans, your actual cost per click goes up. With Google this isn’t the case. You can be rest assured that almost all of the clicks are real and are not generated by any software.

Not only this. Google does a quality check of the clicks its delivering. If they find any click of low quality, they don’t charge their advertisers. This way you are sure you are paying only for real targeted clicks.

8. Many forms of Advertisements: There is more to Google than AdWords. Google helps you to advertise in many forms.

Google Video Ads: http://in.youtube.com/advertise
Google TV Ads: http://www.google.com/adwords/tvads/
Google Click-to-Call: http://www.google.com/help/faq_clicktocall.html

9. Great Customer Care: If you have any suggestion or complaints you can contact Google by login in your adwords account. You should get a reply the within 24 business hours.

Disclaimer: In some cases the reply may be delayed. But you will definitely get a reply soon.

10.  World Class Privacy Policy: If Google says they won’t share your info with any third party, they won’t. However they may use the massive data generated by users to improve their services and products.

Your credit card information is highly safe with Google.

For more information on Google privacy policy please visit:
http://www.google.com/privacy.html

NOTE: I am not paid to promote Adwords, but since I am experiencing a good return on my investment (ROI) with Google Adwords I thought I should share my knowledge on why Adwords is worth considering an online advertising tool.

If you are a Google Advertiser, it will be great if you can please leave your experiences as a comment below.

Related Article: Why pay per click advertising is important for success of your business.

Google AdWords decides the price you pay per click on many factors one of which is the quality of your ad. This decision is made on looking into the ads CTR – click through rate.

The search engines consider an ad of higher quality if its getting higher click through compared to other ads in the same category.

So its important that you test your ad to get the best click through possible. Remember, higher click through means more visitors for less.

Lets discuss how to test your ads.

On a piece of paper write top 5 benefits of your business. When you are writing benefits think from the customers perspective. Think why they should buy from you than from your competitors.

It may take some time to arrive at 5 real benefits to your customer. Take your time but get the right benefits.

Google allows a maximum of 25 characters in the Ad Title or Headline. You can describe about your product in a maximum of 70 characters i.e. a maximum of 35 characters in line 1 and a maximum of 35 characters in line 2. You cannot spilt a word in the two lines.

Write your first ad. Your best benefit should be in your Title. Its just 25 characters so make sure your benefit fits in that space.

Write the rest of your benefits in the 70 characters space you have. Again, try to write your benefits in the description.

Similarly make another ad. This time push your second best benefit in the Title, and the rest in the description.

In your third ad, put your third best benefit in the title. I hope you understand. This way you can create 5 different ads to test.

Now its time to run the ads. Run the ads for a significant amount of time (at least a month) and till each ad gets at least 100 clicks. Make sure that both the criteria are met.

Why am I asking you to do this? Because when you test something you must get a limited number of responses before you can take a decision. Technically this is known as statistically significant response, else based on the results of test you may take a wrong decision.

After all the ads have got the minimum number of clicks, pause two ads with the lowest CTRs.

Write two more ads. This time with inputs from the first three ads according to CTR. You may also want to include any benefits that were left out due to space constraints. Write them in your new ads.

Repeat the test. Run the test till a statistically significant result is achieved. Again pause two ads with the lowest CTRs and write two new ads.

This way you can keep on testing till you have tested all benefits and you get the ad that works best for your landing page.

Like this you can test ads for all your landing pages.

While you test, you will learn a lot of things that you didn’t knew previously. And some results may surprise you.

Believe me testing is fun and a great learning experience. So go ahead and test your ads.

You have a great website. Your visitors love your site and search engines are sending a lot of them for free through organic results. You are happy because you are doing good business and are not bothered about getting traffic through pay per click search engines.

If this is true then you’re wrong because pay per click has a lot of advantageous. Here are some reasons why!

1. Instant Traffic: For the time being just forget the above scenario. If you have a website that isn’t getting much traffic from the organic search engine results, pay per click can bring you instant traffic.

2. Keyword Specific Traffic: Even if your website is getting a lot of traffic for free it may not be getting traffic for the keywords that you are trying. Pay per click can help you generate traffic for those keywords.

3. Helps in Testing: You may need to test a headline or some content or something else, but fearing that this may drop your natural rankings you are not doing it. With the help of PPC you can create a different landing page and test whatever you wanted to test. Just make sure this “test” page is NOT linked from any page from your site to avoid any duplicate content issues.

4. Helps you to know Great Keywords for SEO: With natural rankings, you are limited to only some keywords, so you never know if any other keyword will perform. Using PPC and tracking your results you can know the other keywords that are good for your business. You can then try to optimize your site for those keywords as well for natural rankings.

5. Brand Building: PPC helps your site to get more exposure in major portals/sites, thus increasing your brand value.

6. Research: Even before you launch a business you can do PPC to know what can work and what may not. For example you may launch a dummy site and drive traffic to see the reactions. You can also signup for a similar affiliate program and see what keywords are actually working.

7. Geo-Targeting: If you want to target certain countries or regions, PPC is the best and the quickest option.

8. Low-Risk: Since you pay only for each click, you are at a low risk. You get traffic for the keywords you want, and not for unwanted keywords. Therefore you get targeted visitors who are actually looking for the product or service you are selling.

NOTE: The only problem with pay per click is that there are many secondary search engines around who send garbage traffic mostly generated through software. Please be cautious while advertising through these search engines. I would advise its best to stick with major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN if you want real visitors to your site using pay per click.

These are some of the benefits of advertising through pay per click search engines, however it will be great to know if anyone had other good experiences with PPC.