Writing relevant and compelling text ads is an important factor for the success of your paid search campaigns. However, this could be a challenging job for both you and your PPC agency for the following reasons:
- You as the marketing manager know your products or services well, however, you do not have expertise in writing effective text ads for search campaigns
- Your agency may have expertise in writing effective text ads for search campaigns, however, they may not know your products or services as well as you do
This presents a unique challenge to both you (the advertiser) and the PPC agency. How do we overcome this challenge?
Analyzing your competitors’ text ads and using it to your advantage can help in writing effective text ads to a great extent. For example, you are the marketing manager of a specialty insurance company and your advertising goal is to generate leads for different insurance programs offered on your website. Let’s analyze competitors ads and their takeaways in the following 3 steps:
- Step1 – Select A Product or Service and Its Target Keyword: Identify a single product offering and then one of its target keywords, eg. one of your insurance programs called “Builder’s Risk Insurance”.
- Step2 – Search For This Keyword On Google: Search for this keyword “Builder’s Risk Insurance” on google for your target country and review the top results (the listings below with a green color icon “Ad” are text advertisements and the rest are organic search listings (not advertisements):
Pro Tip: In case you have multiple target countries, you can use this search tool iSearchFrom to search and see local results in those countries
- Step3 – Analyze The Competitors Ads: Looking at the competitors’ text ads above, following are the insights we should take away:
1. Keyword Relevant Ads: Three out of the four ads above have used “Builder’s Risk Insurance” in the ad headline-making their ads relevant to the user’s search query. It’s critical for your ads to be relevant to the search query to be successful on Google Search because ad relevance is an important factor that contributes to the quality score and ad rank.
While auditing AdWords accounts managed by other agencies, we have noticed a number of times that ads are not written in relevance to the keywords. So as a client you must insist that your PPC agency writes relevant ads for every keyword or theme.
2. Advertiser Ratings: The top ranking ad shows a 4.7-star rating for the advertiser. This rating is from a credible third-party rating agency/website and helps ads differentiate the ad ranking as well as competition. Therefore a good idea to work with your PPC agency on getting this in place for your ads.
3. Product/Service Offering and Their Competitive Advantages: The ad description text (in grey color) shows how other advertisers describe their insurance offering for Builder’s Risk. This also reveals the competitive advantage they are talking about in their ads. Have you identified competitive advantages for your products and services? If not then it’s a good idea to do so now and work with your PPC agency to write ads highlighting these aspects.
4. Call To Action: Most of the ads above include a call to action, e.g. “Learn more”, “Rate & Online Quote Today”, “Order Now”, “Speak To An Agent” etc. A call to action (CTA) in your ad asks users to take an action after reading your ad and sets expectations as to what they should expect in return from the advertiser. You must insist your PPC agency includes an appropriate call to action with every ad on your campaigns.
5. Ad Extensions: The third and fourth ads above include additional links at the bottom of the ads. These are called sitelink extensions, a way to offer additional links to pages/content relevant to your product or service offering. Besides there is a number of other ad extensions shown above including – call extensions, callout extensions, and structured snippet extensions. You should work with your PPC agency to understand how these ad extensions could be best utilized for your ads.
6. Display URL: The URLs in green color for two of the ads contains the keyword “builders-risk”. This helps build ad relevance further.
Repeat the three steps above to research competitors ads on your other service offerings and their target keywords. Ideally, your PPC agency should provide the analysis on competitors ads along with a suggested approach to steal their lunch.
Are the text ads on your PPC campaigns compelling and relevant enough to beat your competition? You could check this yourself or ask us for a Free PPC Campaign Audit to analyze this and much for your campaigns.
