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The 2017 Guide To Writing PPC Ads

Just like all aspects of internet marketing, paid search advertising has evolved over time. While the fundamentals remain the same, there are a lot of extra factors you need to take into account when writing adverts for your site in 2017.

With the important need to cater for multiple devices and audience types as well as the added confusion of ad extensions and ever-changing segmentation tools, you really need to keep up to date with the changing landscape of paid search if you are going to create successful advertisements.

With our extensive experience here at UC4, we are familiar with paid search advertising. We’ve decided to share our valuable knowledge with you in this guide, so that you can find out how to best optimise your PPC adverts for success.

Considering Your Audience

Quite obviously, it’s extremely important to consider your audience before you create your adverts. It’s much easier to plan suitable adverts when you know who you’re targeting. With the options that are available nowadays, you can target various different demographics in segments with your adverts. Most businesses will want to target searchers from every (or at least almost every) age range, and with Google’s IF functions you can do just that.

IF functions allow you to write numerous different adverts and target them at different audience demographics. With this feature, you can send out different adverts to users that have visited your site before, and new visitors. So you could send out a promotion to returning visitors to encourage a conversion, and give information about your services to a new searcher to draw them in.

We also recommend using Google’s clever Demographics For Search Ads. This feature lets you use a bid modifier to specify who sees adverts based on demographics like age and gender. For example if you want to target searchers aged between 25-34 with a different ad to everybody else, you create the advert, choose all other age ranges and set a bid modifier to -100%. This will stop your ads appearing to anyone out of this demographic, whilst still letting them see any other adverts you have. By doing this multiple times with all different age ranges, you can send out different ads to every age range.

This method of demographic segmentation can also be done through gender, allowing you to target genders separately.

Writing Ads For Device Specific Campaigns

Another thing to consider in today’s digital marketing world is the presence of multiple online devices. In the space of only a few years, mobile devices and tablets have become just as widely used as desktop computers for browsing the web – if not more. For this reason, it’s crucial that you target a range of devices and don’t just focus your adverts on desktop search.

Mobile has become the primary form of search in 2017, so you should make sure that you are catering adverts for mobile searchers. Luckily, Google has released tools that make it easier for marketers to target mobile users with PPC ads.

Thanks to an update that came in 2016 it’s now once again possible to create mobile-only adverts, which is extremely useful for marketers. These adverts allow you to create adverts that will only show on mobile devices, and not desktop or tablet.

Why would you want an advert that only targets mobile when you could target multiple platforms instead?

The simple answer is to keep campaigns separate and easy to manage. If your adverts are drawing in traffic mainly from mobile search or you just want to specifically target mobile users, it’s useful to set your ad campaign to mobile-only.

Having a mobile-only ad campaign allows you to write your device specific adverts individually per campaign, rather than having all platforms in one campaign together. It also lets you set mobile advertising keyword bids separately in a mobile-only campaign, and all performance data from mobile adverts is kept to its own campaign. So ultimately, running a mobile-only campaign to target mobile users helps to keep your campaigns organised – and you can easily run desktop and tablet campaigns alongside separately so there’s no real downside of doing this.

Also, rather than having data that shows no positive effects from desktop or tablet, you can cut these out entirely and be presented with data from mobile advertising only. Meaning keeping your campaigns mobile-only when targeting mobile users will help to keep your campaign quality scores up.

Working With Ad Extensions

Ad extensions are increasingly common nowadays and they’ve been shown to improve click through rates, so it’s important that you incorporate these into your adverts for the best results. Ad extensions will add new features to your ad snippets, like double headlines, callouts and structured snippets.

When you include an extension in one of your adverts, you should focus on these sections of the ad snippet primarily, as these are the bits that catch the attention of searchers. You should make sure that your extensions include everything they can that’ll help to draw in users. Text extensions should show clearly what your business provides, including relevant keywords and call-to-actions.

Remember that, while not as important as headlines, the snippet descriptions help your advert to draw in potential consumers. For this reason you should make sure you put some time into making these as clear as possible. Your descriptions should explain clearly your business’ services and provide information on everything you offer.

Extensions like reviews and promotion callouts are also good for attracting consumers when correctly used.

Need Help With Your PPC Adverts?

Do you need help creating successful PPC advertisements for your business? UC4 is a Birmingham digital marketing agency with a team of experts on hand who’ll use their years of experience to create specialised advertisements for your site.

Need PPC adverts creating or require any other digital marketing services? Contact us today to find out how UC4 can help you to improve your business’ online success.