When it comes to finding tips and tricks to improving a pay per click advertising campaign, I often discover that to find the best tips and tricks you have to look and analyse already existing PPC campaigns that are running online. This is what started the ‘Analyse A Real PPC Campaign’ which has, in the past, looked at campaigns from the likes of Shade Station, Olay and Twitter. In this article, I will not be specifically looking at one PPC campaign to analyse. Instead, I thought I would change things up and simply look at the different search adverts that appeared before me for when I searched for ‘make money online’ into Google search UK.

The following adverts therefore appeared when I searched for ‘make money online’ into Google search UK:

As you would have probably guessed, the search phrase ‘make money online’ is a very competitive search phrase that advertisers have bid on. From the above adverts, here are a few pointers that have helped make these adverts well optimised helping the advertiser to develop a healthy click through rate:

Use Ad Extensions

Ad extensions are becoming a necessity for advertisers to use with their PPC search adverts. Ad extensions are extra elements that are added to the ‘bog standard’ PPC search advert (which typically consists of a title, description and URL). From looking at the above adverts, two of the adverts have chosen to use ad extensions being the review ratings, Google + follower count and extra links.

Remember that extra links will help get your traffic to the relevant landing page faster reducing the chance of an early exit from a universal landing page (if you did not choose to use the extra links as an ad extension).

Make Sure Advert is Keyword Dense

The next step to making sure that your advert gets clicked on is by making sure that your advert is relevant to what the web user is  searching for. The more that is made bold due to being the same as the search phrase, the better because it makes your advert looked more linked to what the web user is searching for. For example, the top advert about ‘Online Money Trading’ does not seem as relevant as the below two because less of the advert is made bold making clear it is not as relevant to the web user (and looking at the advert, it isn’t since it is about trading online and not making money online).

Include a Call to Action

This is a must do for any advertiser since a call to action is so simple yet extremely effective. The above adverts all use call to actions of ‘Apply Now!’, ‘Sign Up Free’ and ‘Start Today’. If you do not ask the web user to do anything, how can you expect them to click on your advert? A call to action, although simple, will give the web user that extra push of an incentive to click on your advert.