Everywhere I look on Google sponsored results I see poorly written Ads that do not motivate me to take action. What can you do to separate you from your competitors and make you stand out?

Your Google AdWords Ad is only 130 characters in size, made up from a 25 character Headline, 2 x 35 character description lines and finally a 35 character url line. So you are not exactly flush with space to use when trying to sell your products or services. It is therefore critical that you maximize the space as effectively as you can.

Many of the most successful Ads follow a certain layout, this involves using the keyword or key phrase in the headline. Description line 1 contains a unique feature of your product, description line 2 contains a benefit of your product and the url contains the name of your website. Lets break these parts down…

Headline

The headline should contain the keyword or key phrase that was searched for, as this is the first thing that somebody will see when your add appears. The keyword its self will also appear in bold text, signify the importance and drawing attention to itself.

If the keyword is only short you can use the remainder of the 25 character space to drop in additional copy such as Get, Now, Quick, Made Easy or illustrate a discount or price. For example if you were selling Golf Balls your Ad could say “50% Off Golf Balls”, or “Cheap Golf Balls”.

Description Line 1

Is great for a unique feature about your product or service such as “Learn How To…”, “Powerful Business Software” or “Easy To Use, Flexible, Scaleable”. This is your 1 line to explain what is perhaps the most important feature of your product to get people interested.

Description Line 2

This is where you put your benefits, maybe “Low Prices, Free Delivery”, “Free No Obligation Quote”, “Mortgage Calculator! Try Online Now”. Why should a visitor click on your Ad, what is the benefit for them. You need to use something that will catch their eye. Look around at your competitors are saying, do you have a benefit that they don’t, use it.

URL

This is perhaps the most overlooked part of the Ad, too many people just put in their url for the website as is it, for example www.sportinggoods.com. There is a couple of things we can do to improve this (1) capitalize each letter so that the words stand out more and (2) add the keyword after the domain name. So for example www.SportingGoods.com/GolfBalls, the word golf balls will then also appear in bold so you get a bit more presence on the search page.

Now before you start worrying about renaming all your folders and pages on your site, stop. You don’t have to start reorganizing your site, Google allows you to have a display url and a destination url. For the display the example url above could be used, but in the destination url you use the actual url for the webpage on your site. As long as you are not using a completely difference display url from your destination url Google will not have a problem.