Writing Headlines For PPC
August 3, 2010 • Article by Nettie Wells
How many times have you performed a search and been faced with an ad headline you thought was irrelevant? Misleading? Or just plain daft? It happens on a daily basis – mainly because a lot of PPC advertisers seem determined to write copy fitting for Saatchi & Saatchi rather than for search results.
In many ways, writing headlines for PPC is actually more difficult than for traditional media (but then we would say that wouldn’t we?). There are two main reasons for this, the first being that a 25 character limit doesn’t give you an awful lot of manoeuvrability on the creative front. But then this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; the more creative you are with your headline, the more danger you are in of losing relevance to the search query
The second reason is that in addition to grabbing a user’s attention, PPC headlines are nearly always intended to lead the user to take a specific action, whether this is filling in a registration form or buying a product. This means that in those 25 characters you have to implement each of the following points:
- A call to action
- A selling point
- Relevance to the search query
And that’s not always easy. From our experience, the most effective way to write ad headlines is to ensure that your copy is always relevant to a search query – this way Google’s quality score algorithms won’t take one look at your ad and decide that it isn’t relevant enough to appear. In order to achieve this you must take the time to structure your ad groups properly and target the most relevant keywords. This way when a user sees your ad, they should know exactly what they are clicking on.