Google Ads - Copy and Keywords
When running google ads, your money and keywords are what puts the ads in front of the potential customers but your ad copy (the wording of your ad) is what will get them to click on it.
How to find good keywords?
You don’t have to go much farther than the Google keyword planner, especially if your keyword search is for google ads. The keyword planner gives you different keyword variations based on some initial terms you feed it or based on a URL you provide.
For example if you search for “insurance” you will get a list like this:
As you can see the results we are getting are quite broad encompassing all different kinds of insurance. That is because insurance is a “head term” or a very broad one-word keyword. These are usually ineffective because they are competitive, expensive and untargeted. What we want to go for are “body keywords” and “long tail keywords”
For example if we use the body keyword “life insurance”:
These keywords are already more relevant and affordable. If you use and even more narrow “long tail keyword” our such as : “should i buy life insurance” results are even better:
These “long tail keyword” ideas resemble more specific search terms that people actually use. To create a balanced list of keywords we will select a mix of body keywords and long tail keywords. In addition to that we will also adjust the match settings.
What are match settings?
Simply put match settings are the precision with which you want the search to match your keywords. In google ads you can choose between broad match, phrase match and exact match. For our first campaigns we chose to use “phrase match” meaning that the search must include the meaning of the keyword.
Negative keywords
In addition to selecting the keywords for your ads it is also important to include negative keywords. If you look back at our first keyword search you can see that in addition to “life insurance” we also got searches for “car insurance”, “health insurance”, etc. In order to prevent the case that someone searching for a type of insurance we don’t provide will see our ads we need to add these terms to the “negative keywords”.
What about the ad copy?
The ad copy is all the wording that actually appears in the ads. Some tips when wording the ad copy:
Highlight what makes your business unique - why they should choose you and not your competition.
Include your keywords.
Encourage customers to take action.
Be exclusive - offer sales and limited time offers.
Be consistent with your landing page.
Ad copy is highlighted in red.