Ad copy writing and analysis

No matter how much money is pumped into a PPC campaign, the key to its success is still how effective the ads are catching the user attention and answering the motivation behind a particular Internet search. Writing eye catching, informative and brief advertisement copy is one of the most important skills a marketing professional must have, and unlike on TV or graphic advertising the PPC medium is often limited to less than 200 characters, no graphics and no other eye catching tricks such as bright colours or moving elements. Writing ad copy under those conditions may be difficult, but can be greatly helped with appropriate research and access to competitive intelligence provided by a professional marketing tool.

By using a tool such as the keyword tracking tool by iSpionage it's possible to access information about the advertising copy used by other competitors and how often and for how long their ads are being displayed for the different keywords the campaign is focused on. By looking at the ad copy of current ads it's easy to get an idea of what kind of ads are actually working and benefit from the trial and error of your competitors to craft the best advertisement copy for your own ads. But this information is just the start, and is enhanced by actually knowing the ad coverage for that particular ad (or how many times it actually appears over the total number of times a search for that particular keyword is executed and on what position it displays.

Knowing the ad coverage and positioning of competitor's ads gives two types of information. In the first place, it allows you to decide if it's a strong or a weak competitor, since if it doesn't appear very often it's probably never going to be a problem compared with your own ads, even if their ad copy is really good. In the second place, knowing how long a campaign has been running, and the average positioning versus the latest positioning on the search result pages may indicate whether the campaign is just starting, at its peak or slowly running out of budget and soon to be replaced by different ads and different advertising copy, often due to them being not effective enough.

Besides this internal data for each specific ad, it's worth mentioning that the fact that the landing page of each ad is also displayed helps optimizing that area of your own campaign as well. Even if the advertisement copy is great, a landing page which doesn't get the visitor to fulfil the campaign goals will render all the advertisement useless. By looking at the kind of pages successful ads are pointing to is easy to see what kind of landing site actually works, and may give you ideas on how to improve your own. It's important to remember that the landing page of any ad must be closely related to the keywords that triggered that ad and what the user needs were when they clicked on it.

A combination of great advertising copy and a winning landing page is a sure way of making a success of a PPC campaign. Access to competitive intelligence about those two aspects can greatly increase the chances of them being as effective as they can be, and can be a great help when writing ad copy that is engaging, and different enough from your competitors to stand out while benefiting of the best characteristics of competitors landing pages and ad copy. For this reason, a professional keyword monitoring tool is invaluable for a professional marketeer that doesn't want to spend time guessing instead of crafting engaging and successful campaigns.