As we mentioned in our introduction to writing effective ad copy, there are three primary things that a search marketing ad has to do: grab a user’s attention, describe your offering, and tell a user what to do next. The function of a headline is to grab the user’s attention.
When one of your ads appears on a search engine results page (SERP), it’s going to have a lot of competition. We’ve found that users tend to look at ads in the “Sponsored Links” section in clusters, rather than one at a time, so you’re usually competing directly with the one or two ads before and after yours. You may have to compete with ads that receive “Premium Placement” above the organic results, and, well, you’ve also got to compete with those organic results. There are all sorts of elements on the page vying for a user’s attention, and the primary tool for grabbing that attention away from everything else is your ad’s headline.
Not only is the headline especially good at grabbing attention—you shouldn’t try to make it do anything else. As Hunter Boyle recently wrote over at the Marketing Experiments Blog: “The objective of your headline is not to sell, but to connect with your reader. That split-second connection only has to compel readers to continue — not necessarily to buy right away.” In other words, use your headline to grab a user’s attention, and let the description line and “call to action” do their jobs next.
If you’ve already searched the web for tips on writing headlines, you’ve probably found a lot of information about specific words you should use in your copy (“you,” “how,” “money,” “want”) or specific formats to write in (Questions, How-To’s, Announcements). All of these are good tips, but they still don’t make it clear exactly which words you should use in your copy, or exactly which format you should write your ad in. You’ll have a much easier time doing this if you take a preliminary step: think of a user’s search as a question.
Note: This is the second in a series of posts about writing effective ad copy. Click here to read the rest of this tutorial, and to read earlier installments.