Kyle Sulerud - October 24, 2019Let’s break down an ad.
1)Headline
This is a short, yet important part of an ad. This is the prominent part of the ad. It’s actually broken down within the system as:
headline 1
headline 2
headline 3
2) Description
This is longer than the headline. It is where you can talk about certain features of the product or service that you’re offering. This is also broken down into:
description 1
description 2
3) Ad extensions
I will go into detail in future blog posts. This article is mainly going to be about what your message should be in your ad.
Purpose of an Ad
Most of the time, the purpose of the ad is to get somebody to come to your website.
There are instances where that might not happen. Someone might see your ad, and if you have a phone number in the ad, they might just call you, and they can become your customer without ever having been to your website.
But driving those calls should not be the main focus of the ad, because calls don’t happen all the time. Only a small percentage of people would want to call you.
The main purpose of the ad is to get people to go to your website, which obviously contains a lot more information than the ad itself.
So what would you say in an ad that gets someone to go to your website?
Most importantly, you want to make sure that you are solving somebody’s problem. You should be answering their question.
People go to Google because they are trying to get some questions answered or they want to find solutions to their problems. Your ad needs to address that. Make them feel that you have the exact thing that they were searching for.
The headline of the ad should really answer that question. It should really let somebody know they are in the right place.
Sometimes, the headline should also let someone know that they shouldn’t click on the ad, because you don’t want non-customers to click on the ad either.
For example:
You are running an ad for a painting company. But they only do “exterior home painting”.
There’s not a ton of people just searching for “exterior home painters”.
If you want a decent amount of traffic for a campaign like that, you need to be a little broader with your keywords.
You probably need to search for words like “home painting” or “home painters”. Some of the people searching for those types of keywords are not going to be looking for “exterior painting”.
They are going to be looking for “interior painting”. We don’t necessarily know that based on what they search for. But in your ad, you can try to make that very clear, that you are offering “exterior home painting services”.
That’s the type of thing that would go in a headline. You should be attracting the people that you want. Maybe all the other ads just talk about general home painting. Now when someone searches for home painting, but they really want exterior home painting, they are going to gravitate towards your ad that talks about exterior home painting.
With the ad, you want to pull the right people in, and you want to push the wrong people away. Don’t be afraid to push the wrong people away with the ad.
The description and the ad extension basically want to further that goal of bringing people in. They might want to know more about you, other than just the fact that you are an exterior home painter. They might want some more information. Not everyone is going to read the whole ad, some people just read the headline and click. Some people are going to read on, that’s where we want to give them some benefits from actually taking that next step with you.
Sometimes you can just talk about certain features of the product. If you’re selling a product online, you just need to talk about the features that you know people are looking for. Whenever possible, I’d like to talk about benefits, because that’s what people are going to buy. A good format is to talk about features and then transition into benefits.
Really, you don’t have a lot of space in the ad. You need to think about the most important features and benefits of your product or service.
You should fit the most important things into the headline, and then utilize the description lines for other features and benefits.
Things to keep in mind:
For headlines, Google gives you three lines (headlines 1, 2, and 3). But usually, headline 3 does not show. If you want a better chance for it to show, you actually need to make all of your headlines shorter and not use the maximum allowable character count. Whether or not the headline is displayed has nothing to do with character count. It has to do with how much space that headline is going to take up.
When you are writing your ads in Google Ads, it will show you a preview. You can actually see whether or not headline 3 is going to show up on both desktop and mobile. You don’t want to put anything crucial in your messaging in headline 3.
Same with description line 2, that does not always show up. You don’t want to put anything crucial to your messaging in description line 2.
Keep the most important words in your main headline 1 and 2, and description line 1. Remember, the goal is to get people to come to your website where you can then tell them a lot more about your product and service, so that they actually become a customer.