When it comes to creating your PPC text advert, the ultimate objective is to create an advert which will gain lots of clicks: clicks from the right type of traffic. Getting the right type of traffic is achieved through other means such as contextual keywords and the CPC you adopt. However, gaining the raw clicks or a high CTR is achieved through creating a well optimised advert. Most advertisers will presume that the title and description of a text advert are the main reasons people click on the advert. However, by the end of this article, you should be able to learn that the domain has a part in the CTR too. Here is what you need to know about domain names in PPC text adverts.

You Can Have Any Domain Name

The first point everyone needs to know is that you are not at all restricted by what domain name you include into your text advert. The beauty of PPC is that you can lie about your domain name. You might ask why you would do this. Well, here are a few reasons why you might want to include a different domain name in your PPC advert:

• The actual domain name is too long. You may find that your actual domain name is ‘www.yourdomain.com/soihjiwke[ffwx/werwhoqenfenfiblahblahblahandsoon’. Having all that garbage after your actual domain will waste space in PPC and ultimately look extremely bad (resulting in less clicks).
• Your domain name isn’t attractive enough. Your actual domain name might not include the right words to attract web users into clicking on your advert. For example, if a campaign from Microsoft wanted to promote a sale, instead of having ‘Microsoft/products’ (which is this example’s made-up real domain), they could change the domain to something more logical such as ‘Microsoft/sale’.
• You want to differentiate away from your website. Some advertisers don’t like their campaigns to be linked to their main website. Reasons for this is either if the main website is entirely unrelated to the subordinated landing page or simply because the advertiser doesn’t want the web user to wonder off onto the main website if they have spent money getting the PPC traffic onto a designated, well designed landing page.

All the above points are valid. But, do remember that by changing the domain name in your PPC advert will make it harder for traffic to find you without seeing your PPC advert. For example, if the actual domain of a PPC advert was ‘Apple.com’, it is easy to remember the legitimate domain. Therefore, I can still visit this page without having to go through PPC. Using a custom domain will prevent the web user from doing this (unless you buy the domain and redirect it to your main website which will just increase costs: especially if your campaign is short term).

Include Keywords

After reading the above points, you should really be looking to put a custom domain into your PPC. With a custom domain comes freedom. Therefore, it is important you include the right things into your PPC domain name. It is sensible to include one keyword in your domain to make the domain look contextual to what the web user is searching for. Remember that the more related the advert looks to what the web user is searching for, the more likely they are to click on it.