PPC Ad-writing Services

It can be really tough to think of the right words to use and stay within the 25- and 35-character limit in Google pay-per-click. I call it "ad haiku." Plus, Google won't allow exclamation marks in the headline or a lot of the abbreviations you would use to try to get around the tight character limit.

If you hire me — whether to do a PPC tuneup or set up a new AdWords campaign — the first thing I do is analyze your competitors' ads.

You have to find a way to be different. Sometimes the key is using different phrasing to look different from the masses that uses dynamic text insertion (putting the search phrase in, usually as the headline). Yes, Google bolds each word of the search phrase that's in your ad, BUT if everybody has bold in their ad, then you might have to consider running the only ad without bolding. It's like whispering in a noisy room.

The competition with PPC ads is challenging, so I'm always trying new, creative techniques. Creative creatives, you might call it.

Once I saw an ad that stood out from all the rest simply by virtue of its shortness. That's right, some marketing genius decided not to go to the limit of Google's character-limit game and instead made his or her ad so short that you couldn't help noticing it first. I wonder how it did?

Testing ads is simple, too. Always split-test yours ads to see which get clicked on more. Often the results are surprising, and they never fail to give me at least a little insight into how to connect with the potential customer.

My "Landfill" Story

One of my early successes with PPC taught me to think outside the box when it comes to writing ads, and how important it is to try to get inside the heads of the people you want to attract clicks from.

I was working with a client who sold ink and cleaning supplies for inkjet printers. We started his PPC campaign in 2003 and it was going really well until Google stopped allowing us to use brand names in our ads. This really tied our hands, as it was crucial to be able to mention the brand name for a product designed to clean only that brand.

At that time, one particular manufacturer was selling the only inkjet that had no user-replaceable print head. (If you use an inkjet and don’t print often enough, you know how the print head dries up and you have to go and buy a new printer. Built-in obsolescence, I believe it's called.)

This brand of printers had such a high resolution that they clog really easily. Therefore consumers have a difficult choice to make: pay $45 or so for a technician to clean the print head, or spend $60 or so and buy a new one — and toss the clogged printer in the garbage.

My client wanted to advertise a $13.99 cleaning kit especially for that brand of printer, which that manufacturer did NOT sell, and it was frustrating that Google wouldn’t allow us to mention the brand name in our ads. How else would we be able to get the product out in front of the owners of these clogged inkjet printers?

So I had to get creative. We set up a “negative” campaign. I compiled a list of every printer brand we didn't want to target and put them in the negative keywords group. Luckily Google does allow bidding on brand-name keywords, so I was able to put those in our trigger list.

But still, the campaign wasn’t doing very well until one day when I was inspired to write the following ad:

Clogged inkjet printer?
Don't toss it. Clean the print head
and help save our landfills too!

Well, the ad started getting clicked like crazy so the client sold a ton of inkjet cleaners. As time went on we tested several variations, all of which did VERY well.

We not only found a way to connect with the target market, but kept a whole lot of inkjet printers from clogging up the landfills as well!