The Role of Ad Copy in Digital Advertising
The biggest rule of ad copy is also the easiest to remember.
Tell a story, in six words.
Compelling ad copy drives digital advertising, because it plays the role of seizing audience attention.
Exceptional ad copy goes beyond promotion; it captivates, persuades, and inspires action.
Potent ad copy doesn't just speak—it resonates, cuts through the noise and determines the success or failure of a campaign.
This blog will highlight the core components of writing good ad copy, offer tips on crafting attention-grabbing headlines and persuasive descriptions, and provide insights into various platforms like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and YouTube Ads.
Let's get started.
Key Elements of Effective Ad Copy
With a few guidelines, it easy to write ad copy that converts. Creating impactful copy hinges on these fundamental elements:
Clear Value Proposition: Before writing a copy, ask yourself, what unique promise does your product or service deliver? This must be evident immediately to captivate the viewer's interest.
Compelling CTA: It's also important to guide the audience on to their next step with a call-to-action (CTA). This part of the copy stirs them into action, so make sure its clear.
Relevant Copy: This step involves tailoring your message to address specific pain points of your target audience and integrating keywords that match their search behaviors and intentions.
Following these steps can not only optimize resource allocation but may also significantly boost engagement and conversion rates.
To ensure your ad copy strikes a chord, these elements must resonate seamlessly, presenting an undisputed argument that compels visitors to engage without hesitation.
Now that you have these ground rules in mind, here are tips and tricks to crafting good headlines, descriptions and platform specific considerations to keep in mind.
How to Write Ad Headlines: Techniques and Tips
Headlines are often your first, and sometimes only, chance to engage your audience.
Understanding the hook of your offering is essential. Once you've understood it, distill it into a crisp copy. Imagine this copy on a website; will your headline must be intriguing enough to attract a click or stop fingers from scrolling?
Studying the competition is another crucial step. Use Facebook or Google ad libraries to take a look at what your competitors are doing. Look at what kind of approaches your competition takes and what kind of headlines work within your industry.
Clickbait might seem like a promising avenue, but ignore it. Instead, prioritize headlines that highlight clear benefits or solutions to problems. The concept of six-word stories can be a useful tool here, distilling your message to its potent core.
Start off your headlines with action verbs to inspire a sense of urgency or immediate need. Alternatively, you can start with a question to invoke the readers' curiosity.
How to Write Ad Descriptions that Capture Attention
Once the reader is done reading the headline, their eyes naturally move to the description. This is your chance to reel them in.
Research your audience and competitors thoroughly to understand what drives action in your industry. Incorporate these techniques into your copy, and see your outcomes grow.
Let’s take this example of a Google search ad. The headline is under 30 characters, clearly communicates the message, and sells the product clearly. The description on the other hand explains the offering in depth while still keeping the copy crisp and promises results to drive curiosity.
Apart from this, incorporate primary and secondary keywords naturally to improve ad visibility and relevance. This ensures that your platform of choice serves your ads to the people you want to target.
An effective technique is to integrate symbols and numbers, which can break the monotony of text and make key information pop. Numbers can also lend credibility and specificity to your claims, enhancing trustworthiness.
Calls-to-action should be embedded seamlessly within your descriptions, guiding potential customers toward the desired action.
Writing Ad Headlines and Descriptions for Google Ads, Facebook, and more
Understanding platform nuances is critical in digital advertising. Each platform—Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube—presents unique opportunities and challenges in reaching your target audience.
How to Write Google Ad Copy
The name of the game when it comes to Google Ads is targeting. Given that the Google Display Network can connect with more than 90% of internet users, it's crucial to ensure your ad copies are precise and tailored. Good Google ad copies thrive on keyword relevance and quality scores, making ad copy and targeting precision crucial. Here are some tips, straight from Google themselves:
Avoid generic sales language, instead use more relatable CTAs. This drives a false sense of urgency, resulting in better outcomes
Check insights from Google tools like Ad Strength and Search Terms Report to know how your ads are performing and tweak them accordingly
Tie your messaging to your keywords for effectiveness of your search ads. This ensures you get better reach on your well-written copy
Take a look at this example by Zendesk. It starts off with a strong claim to drive interest, and capitalizes on it with a CTA for a free trial. The description gives just enough information about the brand while staying crisp, and the CTA buttons also reinforce the messaging.
To know more about Google ad copy best practices, check out this in-depth blog.
How to Write Meta Ad Copy
Meta's platforms are the best place to advertise a product or service, especially in the consumer segment. Research has also found that consumers are 50% more likely to buy something they saw on Facebook.
For better results, structure your ad copies to drive purchases, but pay attention to audience engagement strategies to optimize conversion rates. Meta’s platforms also have different kinds of ad units. Here’s how you can optimize your copy for each of them:
Image ads: These ads are a single image that appear in different placements and aspect ratios. For this kind of ad, make sure your text is super crisp and is included in the body instead of ad image. According to Facebook, lots of text could hurt conversion rates, so keep it simple.
This ad by 360Learning is a great example. 5 words in the main copy, with a short description stating “Netflix-style binge-learning won’t solve the current learning crisis”. This piques curiosity in the reader, driving action towards the obvious CTA to “Get the Ebook” and learn more.
Carousel ads: These ads give users a gallery of images or videos that they can swipe through. This is a good format to showcase various aspects of your offerings, or different product SKUs. Each will have its own headline, CTA, and description, so they can also be a good place to try out writing different kinds of ad copies.
Stories ads: These are full-screen ads that pop in as the user swipes through their stories. These are mainly video and image-driven experiences, so keep your text short and succinct. Split it across multiple slides to get your message across better.
How to Write LinkedIn Ad Copy
LinkedIn Ads cater to a professional audience. According to a Nielsen study, brands were perceived to be more professional and intelligent when advertising on Linkedin. Use this to your advantage. Write with professional language and try to advertise the bottom line your offering can bring to the table. Also, make use of profile-based data to cater to high-quality lead generation.
There are many different kinds of ads on LinkedIn, but we'll be focusing mainly on InMail ads and Text ads, since these hinge heavily on your ad copy.
InMail: Inmail allows you to run highly-targeted ad creatives through LinkedIn messaging. These ads usually drive stronger response rates than an email marketing campaign, but the key lies in the personal messaging aspect. Your message needs to connect with your target, so make sure your language is personal and speaks directly to your audience. While it's important to stay professional, use it to your advantage and try to address some concerns they might have.
Take this Inmail as an example. It starts with a personalized salutation and introduction, then moves into a statistics to add authority to the talking points. Keeping the flow going, the message goes into a CTA and offers 3 options; one to double-click into the success story, one to get started, and one to learn more. This format not only drives results, it also funnels your leads according to their interest.
Text ads: Text ads, on the other hand, allow you to customize your message for a specific target audience. The key here is making use of LinkedIn's high level of targeting by setting a focused targeting criteria and calling out your audience in your copy. Also, create multiple ad variations so you can test which strategy is most successful.
How to Write Ads for Native Platforms
Apart from the big 3, you also have various other platforms like Taboola, Outbrain, and more. These native platforms serve display ads all over the web. Here are some platform-specific considerations to keep in mind:
Taboola: Apart from complying with the platforms' content restrictions, there are few other best practices to follow on Taboola. Your ad titles must make sense and must use proper spelling, grammar and punctuation. They also shouldn't be misleading, clickbaity, and must accurately reflect the source of the content. Apart from this, take a look at some examples to understand what works.
Outbrain: This platform has a comprehensive guide to follow through to make sure your copies are compliants. Some key takeaways are to avoid sensationalized headlines which are "too good to be true", copies that contain offensive words in any language, and excessive capitalization or punctuation. TThe ads should also include source names for advertising transparency. It's also worth going through their guidelines to ensure your content doesn't fall into their prohibited categories.
Ad Copywriting AI Tools
Creating compelling and compliant ad copies is important to keep your outcomes on an upward trend. You’ll also have to create numerous copy variations for effective A/B testing, all while keeping guidelines and industry trends in mind. Sometimes, advertising platforms also change their guidelines and algorithms, spiking your results or driving them into the ground. It's also difficult to predict how these copies will do in these changing tides.
Consumer behavior and market trends are in constant flux, and so your ad strategies should be agile too. Regularly revisit your ad copy to update language, integrate emerging trends, and incorporate user feedback.
This is no easy task, especially if you’re looking to scale up your ad content workflows. Introducing Yarnit—your ultimate solution for these challenges. With Yarnit, you won't have to worry about your outcomes. We update our fine-tuned ad use-cases to stay in line with the changing guidelines and algorithms of today's ad networks.
Additionally, we've optimized specific use-cases for major platforms such as Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, as well as networks like Taboola. These use-cases come with built-in guidelines, allowing you to expand your advertising initiatives without facing high rejection rates. Some of our clients have reduced their content creation times by 75% and lowered rejection rates to less than 5%.
Creating ad content on Yarnit is straightforward. Simply select an ad use-case, input your ad unit's specifics, and click generate. Our system will provide you with multiple variations, each accompanied by a sentiment analysis to gauge the potential effect on your audience.
Let's take an example of writing an ad copy for Google Ads. Navigate to the Google ads use case on the platform, write down the talking points you want to emphasize, add your desired CTA, and click the generate button. Alternatively, you can also type in the URL of your desired product/offering and the platform will pick up the rest.
After generating the copy, Yarnit's Empath provides insights into potential perceptions of the text. Additionally, it offers options to edit, modify the tone, condense the content, and more.
Yarnit provides tools that support this cycle of creation and improvement, promoting innovation and efficiency in crafting ad strategies that resonate deeply with audiences.
FAQ:
How to write ad copies for Google Ads?
When crafting ad copy for Google Ads, it's essential to adhere to best practices and guidelines to ensure your ads are effective and compliant. Google Ads text ads consist of three headlines (up to 30 characters each), two description fields (up to 90 characters each), and two optional "Path" fields (up to 15 characters each). Your headlines should grab attention and include relevant keywords, while your descriptions should highlight key details and include a clear call to action. Consider leveraging ad assets like location, phone number, or additional deep links to provide more information about your business. You can also utilize dynamic text to customize your ads for each viewer.
What should I avoid when writing Google ad copies?
Ensure your ad copy is truthful, accurate, and complies with Google's advertising policies. Avoid using misleading or exaggerated claims, and focus on creating compelling, informative content that resonates with your target audience.
How do you write an ad copy example?
Writing a good ad copy involves showcasing your unique value proposition while adhering to character limits. Here's an example for an online shoe store:
Headline 1: Stylish Shoes for Every Occasion
Headline 2: Free Shipping & Returns
Headline 3: Shop Now & Save 20%
Description 1: Discover the perfect pair of shoes for any event. Enjoy a wide selection of styles and sizes.
Description 2: Get free shipping, easy returns, and a 20% discount on your first order. Shop today!
This ad copy effectively highlights the store's offerings, includes a compelling discount, and encourages immediate action with clear calls to action like "Shop Now" and "Shop today!"
How do I start writing an ad copy?
To begin writing an ad copy, first identify your target audience and define your advertising goals. Research relevant keywords and phrases that your potential customers might use when searching for your product or service. Craft attention-grabbing headlines that incorporate these keywords naturally, and use the description fields to communicate your unique selling points, benefits, and any promotions or offers. Ensure your ad copy aligns with your brand voice and messaging, and include a strong call to action that encourages users to take the desired step
How do you write a body copy for an ad?
When writing the body copy for a Google Ads text ad, focus on the two description fields, each allowing up to 90 characters. Use this space to provide more details about your product, service, or offer. Highlight the key benefits and features that set you apart from competitors, and address any potential concerns or questions your target audience may have. Use persuasive language and create a sense of urgency or exclusivity to encourage users to take action
Writing Ad Copies that Convert
The landscape of ad copy is continuously evolving, shaped by technological advancements and shifting consumer behaviors. To stay ahead, content creators must embrace a mindset of continuous innovation and learning.
By leveraging Yarnit's AI-driven tools, advertisers can streamline their ad strategies and yield remarkable results. These tools not only uphold best practice standards but also offer pathways to explore new creative horizons.
As a content creator, now is the time to take action. Integrate these insights and tools into your ad strategy to craft compelling, effective ad copy that not only captures attention but drives meaningful engagement and conversions.
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