10 Essential Tips For Writing The Copy Of Your Google Ads
Google Ads
Google ads have changed a lot in the last few years. Now we have new formats, locations in products that didn’t exist until recently, integration with ecommerce catalogs, and much more.
But the truth is that despite all these changes, the keys to writing persuasive advertising copy remain the same as they were decades ago. That’s why I want to share 10 timeless recommendations for writing the best Google Ads.
10 Timeless Recommendations To Write Better Google Ads
1. The More Informative Your Ad Is, The More Compelling It Will Be.
The first advice for writing better Google ads comes from David Ogilvy, considered the father of modern advertising.
Ogilvy believed that the ultimate key to succeeding with your ads is to provide useful information to customers to act on it.
To apply this to your Google Ads, you can use two tools: autocomplete suggestions from Google and other search engines and Answer the Public.
The technique consists of entering keywords related to products and services and exploring the different results to understand what kinds of things are going through the heads of your potential customers. Thus, you will be able to identify what their main doubts and concerns are and respond to them with copies of your Google Ads.
2. Use The Principle Of Scarcity.
The well-known principle of scarcity is collected in the book Influence by Robert Cialdini, published in 1984. Cialdini is a psychologist who dedicated himself to investigating what makes people feel attracted to something.
One of its main conclusions is that the smaller the amount of something available, the more likely people are interested in it. This can work by limiting the availability period and the number of units.
Marketers have been using this principle successfully in their ad copy for decades, and of course, it works in Google Ads. But be careful: being based precisely on exclusivity, it is very likely that this technique will stop working if it is abused.
For example, if you offer a discount every month, your copy encouraging people to take advantage before it’s gone will become ineffective over time. But if you focus on notable dates like the annual sales or black Friday, the principle of scarcity can be a compelling incentive for your online sales.
3. Pick Your Battles Wisely.
In their book Positioning, Al Ries and Jack Trout argue that it is essential to understand how consumers perceive your competition. For example, if a competitor is perceived as the leader in low prices, it will be tough for you to win the battle for that space.
As an advertiser, you must find your place in a competitive market to position your product in Google Ads properly. You can always take advantage of some features; for example, you know a hyper-local market better, your customer reviews are better, or you always answer calls.
4. The Consumer Is Selfish.
According to Claude Hopkins, author of Scientific Advertising (published in 1923), customers are fundamentally selfish, and they will not buy your product unless you can meet your specific needs. It is a straightforward principle, but it is easy to lose sight of it.
Luckily, today we have many tools at our disposal to identify the “selfish needs” of our potential customers, as we saw in tip #1, so it is elementary to find out what your customers want. Sometimes it can be crude, but no one has solved it yet.
In any case, when you manage to identify these selfish needs, make them explicit in your Google Ads copy. Users don’t want you to talk about yourself and your product but about how you can help them with their problems.
5. Be Empathic
In his classic 1937 book How to Make Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie advised telling customers what they want and showing them how to get it. In the end, it is a logical consequence of the previous principle: your advertising should talk about your customers, not about you.
To connect at this level with customers, you have to go a step beyond simple research and try to empathize on an emotional level. Understanding your potential customer’s emotions is very important in many sectors, from gyms to baby products.
If you don’t know what the emotional needs of your audience are, the recommendation is always the same: investigate! Ideally, ask directly to people who are part of your target audiences either informally or through market research. If this is not possible or in a complementary way, it is also an excellent idea to search for online communities around the key topics of your brand and see how they are talked about.
6. Don’t Try To Impress Other Advertisers.
In 1916, Robert Updegraff wrote a short story for the Saturday Evening Post called Obvious Adams – The Story of a Successful Businessman (“Adams the Obvious: the story of a successful businessman”). Over time, this text has become a great advertising classic.
The principles that can be deduced from this story are nothing new; moreover, as its title indicates, everything is quite apparent. But it is a common sense guide that remains as valid today as it was more than a century ago.
According to Updegraff, remember that the goal of advertising is not to surprise other advertisers with clever ads but to reach our target audience. Applied to our Google Ads copy, this means that sometimes you have to stop looking for creative twists to the text and be noticeable.
7. Use Language That Your Audience Recognizes
Another of Ogilvy’s famous maxims is “talk to them in the language they use every day.” In other words, you have to make the audience identify with what you are telling them through everyday language.
The first step to achieve this effect is to forget too technical jargon unless you address a specific audience that uses such terms daily. The second, again, is to find out what your target audience “sounds like” by talking directly to them or by visiting their online communities.
8. Do Not Be The Best, Be The Opposite.
Ries and Trout, the authors of Positioning, published another timeless book in 1993: The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.
In this book, Ries and Trout detailed 22 principles of marketing that should always be respected, and most of them are still valid almost 30 years later.
One of these principles is that you do not have to be better than him to beat the market leader, but oppositely position yourself. For example, we have the case of Apple, which is not the market leader (almost 3 Android devices are sold for each one with iOS), but which takes advantage of this circumstance to position itself as a different alternative.
9. The law of concentration
Another of the principles of The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing that remains more valid than ever is the law of concentration.
It is not human that human beings have short periods of concentration, and today we are surrounded by distractions. In the case of Google Ads, we have to compete with a lot of organic and paid results that compete for the consumer’s attention. And in the same way, most companies have multiple tools and related solutions.
The solution is to limit the focus of your ads as much as possible: instead of talking about everything you can offer, focus on a very specific problem and provide a single solution. Thus, you ensure that your message is easy to understand and reaches your audience even with a limited number of characters.
10. Prove What You Say
Almost 80 years ago, Victor Schwab already stated that for advertising to work, it has to offer the consumer a rational justification for your emotional decisions. This principle is reflected in his book How To Write a Good Advertisement (“How to write a good advertisement”).
The conclusion that we can draw is that our Google Ads ads must include facts, figures, testimonials, scientific studies, or other concrete evidence that the consumer can use to feel comfortable with the decision to buy our product or service. This is especially important in the case of products with a high cost or that require an ongoing commitment (for example, the monthly payments of a gym).
Also Read: The 10 Characteristics Of Advertising
