What follows are some pay per click ad tips to help you increase your return on investment.

Your goal must be to create an ad that moves people to take action by clicking on your ad, visiting your website, and buying your products or services.

What Is The Purpose Of A PPC Ad?

The purpose of a pay per click ad is simply to get the reader to take the next logical step… click to your web site or a landing page. Your website may provide reams of information, or as most experienced marketers suggest, sending them to a landing page or squeeze page, which is a lead generation approach, where the visitor is asked for their contact details before you reveal the information they are looking for.

Either way, your ppc ad has one job and one job only. That job is to SELL THE CLICK.

If the reader doesn’t click on your ad NOW, you will have lost an opportunity to make a sale – whether it be immediately or game over! They won’t read it twice. That s why, as you will see, the headline is so very important.

One important factor to always remember… the purpose of your ad should rarely be to sell the product! Trying to sell your product using a small ad (compared to the words one can use on a website) has been called one-step marketing. One-step marketing is most effective for products where there is already a perceived value, as in a brand name, or if you have some competitive edge, like price.

Over the years, it has been proven that a two-step process works best for most products, and that a two-step selling process works very well on the Internet. Most of the ads you you have responded to are probably using a two-step method.

Using a two-step method, you use the ad to create an interest (or curiosity) about your product or service, then take the reader to your website, where your web copy makes the sale. That is why we say that the job of the ad is to “sell the click”. All that matters is that the person clicks to your website or landing page. If they click, your ad has done its job!

Now that you know something about the two methods of writing ads, let’s now look at the process of how to write a great pay per click ad.

The Three Elements Of A PPC Ad That Gets The Click

A pay per click ad is very similar in structure to a classified ad. Both contain three
essential elements for success. While they are to be thought of as separate elements, it is when they flow together that you create a great ad. Best of all, you can often mix and match these three elements from your most successful ads to create a super-ad!

The three parts of a great Pay Per Click Ad are…

1. The Headline
2. The Body
3. The Call to Action

The Headline

You have about seven words, or three seconds, to get people to stop scanning and read your ad. Once they pass it up, they won’t come back and read it later. In light of this, your headline must grab the reader’s immediate attention while fitting in with the rest of your ad.

NOTE: Some people use sensational headlines with no relationship to their offer in order to grab attention. We don’t recommend this approach because integrity is what sells best long term. Why tell them you lack integrity with the first words they ever read from you?

One example is the word free. If you really do offer valuable, free information there s nothing wrong with saying so. But if you consider the copy on your website to be that free information, as opposed to a free eBook for example, you will create disappointment in the mind of your reader by using the word free.

Be accurate and specific, especially when creating expectation and you can t go wrong!

Here are some ideas to help you write a great headline for your pay per click ad.

1. Your ad should help them immediately understand your offer.

2. Begin each sentence with an action word.
Use words like NOW, YOU, MONEY, or FEEL.

3. Show your sense of humor if possible. Humor is the universal language.

4. Create curiosity.

5. Use all caps in the headline only. But be sure to check the rules of the search engine you are using first.

6. Ask a question.

7. Psychologists tell us there are only two things that motivate people to action. The first is fear of loss and the other is promise of gain. Whether these are the only two or not, they are certainly powerful and should be part of every headline.

8. Appealing to ego also works well. People love to be the first on the block to
own a new invention yet hate to take risks. Consider your audience first before you choose how to motivate them.

Remember, the headline is the ad for your ad. You are using those 5 to 7 words only to sell the reader on reading the rest of the ad. Creating curiosity is perhaps the best headline writing technique.

9. To help you get a feel for what a great headline looks like for your specific keyword, simply Google your keyword, with and without quotes, and see the ads on the right hand side of the page one search results.

Do you see how each of these proven headlines is brief yet makes you want to know more?

10. Based on what you find from using tip # 9, start a Swap File Of PPC Headlines.

Creating your own swap file is easy. Start a word processing document you can access and open quickly. Then when you notice a headline that catches your attention, make a copy and put it in that file.

Then when you need a great headline, use the headlines you collected as idea starters. We would never recommend that you copy a headline word for word, but using a great headline, to stimulate your thinking, will help you write your greatest headlines quickly and easily.

11. The final payper click ad tip for headlines is this:

Just remember, before creating the ad that gets the click, be sure to check the ad rules of the PPC Search Engine advertising program that you are using.

As an example, Google Adwords has the following guidelines:
Headline & 2 Lines Of Ad text- up to 95 characters total.
Display URL – must fit within a 35-character limit.
Destination URL – can be up to 1,024 characters and is the actual web page users will land on when they click on your ad.

The Body Copy

The body of the ad is the place to sell them on why they should click through. The key to writing great body copy is benefits. People who read your ads will care about one thing… what’s in it for them!

The more your ad tells them, very clearly, what they will get from your product or service, the more they will click on your ad and buy your products or join your mailing list!

Does your offer help them save time? Tell them that. Does it help them make more money? Tell them!

What benefit will they get by making that click? What return on their investment of time will they receive by going to your site or getting your email? If you don’t answer that question, you won’t properly set up the next step, called the call to action.

Here’s an easy formula to decide what to put in the body of your ad.
List all the features of your product or service then, next to them, list the benefits of those features. You must write at least one benefit for each feature, or don’t use that feature. People buy what your product or service will do for them, not only what it will do.

Example:

Our software will help automate your daily tasks (feature), which means you will have more free time. (Benefit) (They’re buying free time, not automation.)

The key step in writing great body copy is to list all the benefits that your product or service offers and choose the top one to place in the body of the ad. Remember, try to write them as benefit statements using action words.

One challenge with short ads is that they don’t offer you much room. This means you will have to trim, trim and trim again. Here’s an easy way to do that.

Write your ad with no concern to how many words you use. Strike through or delete unnecessary words.

Short phrases that get attention, especially since you have certain space/character restrictions, as discussed above. Get the point? Understand?

Now count your characters. If you are way off count, limit yourself to the top benefit that your visitor will receive. Keep working until you have a powerful ad that clearly states a benefit that people want.

When you finish you should have two lines of text that clearly state what benefit your reader can expect to receive from the product or service being promoted.

The Call to Action

This is a critical part of the ad. Don t skimp on paying attention to how you ask someone to take action!

At first blush, it seems like a simple click here will do. And that s where many online marketers make their mistake. Their headline creates curiosity. Their body copy lists the benefits people want. But their call to action leaves the reader with the feeling that they are about to be cheated or conned, and that spells disaster for any ad.

The person reading your ad decides at this moment whether or not to click through, so saying the right thing is vital. What this means to you is that you must keep the call to action short and simple, and make it the next logical step for your reader. It’s often good to add a qualifier to the call to action by asking a question which can be
answered by clicking.

Such a question (using the example above) might be…
Want to save time today? Click the link below.

Or you could write it like this… Click the link below to save time today!
Where possible add an action word that convinces the reader to take action now.
HOT TIP: The best formula for writing a compelling call to action statement is to restate the main benefit.
Let s say that your product is one that saves time for the customer. In your body copy, you tied saving
time (the feature) to spending more time with the family (the benefit). A call to action statement like Click here to begin spending more time with your family today! would work well.

In Conclusion

As with every aspect of online marketing, testing is the key to success. Each element of your ad, the headline, body copy, and call to action, deserve a thorough test. Once you find a great headline, use it with several different sounding ads to see which pulls the best result.

Using the simple techniques above, you should be able to fashion an ad that works well and produces consistent profits. As with all advertising, you must test, test and test again to know what works.

One more quick tip. Once you have your ad written, be sure and do the following. We do this with every ad we run and it has saved us time and embarrassment. We hope it does the same for you.

Pay close attention to capitalization and punctuation. Use a spell checker but don’t trust it completely. Proof read your ad! Format your ad to 65 character hard return. Turn off word wrapping when you write your ad.