The most common pitfall is to think that writing AdWords™ ads is kind of an easy job.

OK, they're short. So what? The toughest part in writing them is exactly that: their briefness. But here are a few tips you can use, in order to help your ads receive more clicks (most of them learned from Perry Marshall), the “Pay-per-click Guy”.

• Use the keyword in your ad

  On AdWords™, the phrase that the user types in the search box is highlighted in bold when found in the search results, no matter if we're talking about organic results or paid ads. People rather click where they see the words they've searched for. By using the keyword in your ad (body or title) your have an advantage over the competitors who don't.

• Use capitalization in your URL

  Suppose your domain name goes something like this: “All Hard to Fix Resolved”. You can write it like this: www.allhardtofixresolved.com. We bet that you'll find it hard to read yourself. But www.AllHardToFixResolved.com looks more readable.

• Use numbers whenever possible

  By including prices and several other numbers in your ad copy you can increase your targeted click-thrus. An ad that fairly displays the price of the product eliminates a part of the so called tire-kickers (untargeted traffic).

  Communicating the price is very important. When you're looking to buy something, you'll probably ask about the price in the first place; not because you want to play the difficult customer, but because you need to know whether you can afford it or not. But most vendors or advertisers fail to serve you the price of a product quickly enough. That's when you begin to feel frustrated and they begin to feel like losing clients.

  The price is more important if you write it as a benefit by using discounts, special offers and promotions (it sure helps if you have the Perfect Price). And with this we get to the next point:

• Promote benefits ahead features

  First of all you must learn to discriminate among these two categories. The benefits of a product tell you what's in it for you if you buy. Features are more likely to tell you what functions the product performs. Seems like the same thing? Well, it's not. See for yourself:

  Features

  • The coffee I had this morning contained 100 mg of caffeine.
  • Airplanes travel 1000 km per hour.
  • The PDF is 100K.

  Benefits

  • The coffee kept me awake until next morning.
  • Airplanes can take me to Paris six times faster than trains.
  • The PDF takes only 10 seconds to download.
• Give up the affiliate status

  We noticed that there are advertisers that keep mentioning their affiliate status in their ad copy — this can drive customers away. There's no need of this anymore, since Google's Affiliate Policy Change.

The above mentioned are almost technical features that AdWords™ ads have to meet in order to produce maximum results. Aside from them, we want to suggest some dos and donts in writing your ads:

• Create a strong connection between your ad and your landing page. This is crucial in maintaining a good conversion rate.
• Eliminate mispositioned ads. Redefine your target niche if necessary, and use more productive keywords.
• Use meaningful phrases.
• Eliminate every word that doesn't bring value to your ad. The word count in AdWords™ is so tight that there's no room for "click here", "see (this link)" and so on.
• Important: test, test, test! Learn how to play “beat my control” from Perry Marshall. That's the path to great CTR.

No copywriting skills? No problem. Ken Envoy and Joe Robson can Make Your Words Sell.