New to Paid search? At 54 Digital we believe in a culture of sharing and educating, so we’ve created this paid search 101 guide.

In Part 3 we will cover everything you need to know about Ad Copy and how to create it so you pay less for clicks and get quality clicks.

Ad Copy Overview

In its most basic form, ad copy is made up of three headlines, two description lines a display URL which might contain two extra paths.

The three headlines can have up to 30 characters each, and description lines can have up to 90 characters each. Paths which are part of your display URL can have up to 15 characters each.

Even though, we have all that space avialable to use, Google usually shows Headline 1 with rotating Headline 2 and Headline 3.

And in Google, the ad would look something like;

The ad is relevant to what the user has typed into the search query.

Increase relevance, perform better.

You can add as many keywords into Google Ads as needed/relevant and write specific ad copy to show to those specific queries. There is no point adding keywords for the sake of it, i.e. keywords which users will never search for.

As a note, these ‘groups’ of keywords as known as ad groups.

You segment your account by grouping keywords into relevant ad groups, and writing ad copy for each of those groups.

On top of the basic advert with three headlines and two description lines, you can use lots of different features to make your ads stand out more. Known as Ad Extensions, Google massively encourages their use.

With ad extensions you can add a lot of supplementary information to your ad such as;

• Additional product links
• Reviews you have received
• The location of your business
• Any special offers such as black Friday.

Going back to the first example of Summer Dresses, below are examples of adverts with some of the extensions added showing how much more information you can provide to a user and to qualify your advert and increase relevancy.

There are a large list of extensions available for different purposes and the use of extensions (or lack of) can directly effect the amount you pay per click now. Other common extensions not shown above are call out extensions and structured site snippets.

Note that the cost of each click can be directly impacted by the ad extensions you do or don’t have on your advert! Again Google is encouraging their use as much as possible.

That’s about all for a basic run down on text ads. We’ll cover Google Shopping next, not as in quite as much detail. In some ways it is a lot more complicated and other it is not. If you are planning on running and paid search its worth at least speaking to an experienced marketer, if only for some guidance.