In my articles on landing page optimisation, I always tend to say that the landing page is one of the, if not the, most important aspect to a PPC campaign since it is the area where the conversion takes place. However, if you have the most amazingly optimised landing page, a poor search advert will bring poor quality traffic to it which will result in low conversions again. Therefore, there are many important aspects to a PPC campaign and the landing page and search advert are just two of them. Considering it is the first interaction with the web user, you need to make sure your search advert is well designed. Therefore, here are three things that tend to make PPC search adverts poor and consequently fail.

Too Much Information

There is only so much time you have to grab the web user’s attention with a search advert. In that time, you need to make sure the web user is engaged and genuinely interested in the contents of your advert. But, more importantly, you need to make sure you provide just a tad too little information so that the web user has another reason to click on your advert: to find out more. If you display all the information he or she wants in the search advert, that is one less reason to click on it, right? This is why some of the best adverts are the shortest like Apple tend to do with their adverts in PPC.

Too Little Information

On the contrary, there is always the other extreme that you provide the absolute minimum amount of information in your search advert so that the web users cannot even engage with your advert. This is why it is important to not overfill or under fill your advert since both have negative consequences to the success of your campaign. As a rule of thumb, I make sure for simple adverts that either the title or the description has a line of information and the other is left to 1-3 words.

‘Too Good To Be True’

‘If something seems too good to be true, it often is.’ <- That is what web users think. Therefore, if you have included too many call to actions in your advert (two as an absolute maximum), included some sort of miraculous figure (like 70% off), you will either get poor traffic or no traffic at all.

Therefore, to sum up, you need to make sure you include enough information to get the web user to engage with your advert but not too much so they feel they don’t need to click onto your landing page and make sure you don’t make your advert seem too good to be true. In essence, it seems a lot but with an advert you can experiment. This is because if it fails, the worst that can happen is that you get a terrible CTR which will hardly effect your PPC budget.