Know-How Exchange : Copywriting

Hi Marlene,

You are talking about AdWords so you have 25 characters for your title and 35 each for 2 description lines = 95 including spaces and punctuation.

The important thing to remember is that with this extreme limitation, this is not the selling stage, so you don't need long copy. If Google offered it, nobody would read long ads anyway, so it would be self-defeating.

This is the qualifying stage, so use this to your advantage and think in terms of short, qualifying copy.

The copy you write should be relevant enough to induce a positive response - a click-through to your landing page - but specific enough to limit that action to potential customers only, not window shoppers because they can only cost you money.

The best way to approach this is to work up 2 ads (Google will rotate them), essentially taking advantage of the A/B testing Google offers and test, measure, test, measure, test, measure.......

Each ad should have a simple and clearly worded offer, either one or two clear key value propositions, and/or a 3rd-party endorsement and/or a clear call-to-action and/or content worded so as as to turn away any inappropriate prospects.

Think Haiku - that might help you get started.

With these 2 ads you have basically infinite possibilities to test - and measure - all kinds of combinations headlines and description lines. The essential data is all provided to you by Google.

The thing to remember is that you want to get qualified prospects to your landing page because here is where you have as much room as you need to give your full sales pitch.

Landing pages are key. You want to turn impressions into click-throughs of qualified prospect and turn this clicks into conversions, and you'll lose a lot of these qualified clicks and costly clicks if you land them on your homepage if it doesn't directly satisfy their initial keyword search.

I hope that helps.