The search advert for pay per click advertising is the most used structure for an advert and there is good reason for this too. They are easy to create and are the only adverts that can be displayed for search engine results (whereas image/flash adverts can only be displayed on publisher websites). Already I have looked into how to create a great title for a PPC search advert. So, on the list of things to do, this article will look into will be the description. For this reason, here are some ways you can create a great description for a PPC search advert.

First things first, the description very much depends on how you have structured your title. By this, if you chose a title with a lot of content, it would be wise to reduce the length of your description to a minimal so you do not over clutter the whole advert with text. With search adverts, first impressions are absolutely everything so the whole objective is to entice the web user into a click – nothing more and nothing less.

On the other hand, if you chose to keep the title of the advert quite short, you can afford to use more description space for content.

Include a Call to Action

As I stated in creating a great title article, it is important to include 1-2 call to actions somewhere in your advert. If you chose to include one in the title, it is a necessity to include one in your description. You may think it is a waste of time and space include a CTA in the description. However, by re-solidifying to the web user what you want them to do really does increase the click through rate of the advert. A call to action takes up minimal space too – ‘Find out more’, ‘Buy now’, ‘Save now’ and so on are all valid call to actions that can be stuck at the end of a description and increases the overall performance of your advert. For this reason, it is definitely something worth doing.

2 Lines vs 1

With the description, you can populate it with content on not just one line but two lines. However, it is a another question whether you should use one line or two:

• One line helps to give a minimalist feel to the advert, so would be beneficial if the title of the advert is relatively short.
• Two lines can help to make your advert larger on search results and make it seem like an ad extension too – it is common for the first line to be used as a standard description with the second line being used to display something such as reviews out of 5 stars etc.

Ultimately, creating a great description depends significantly on what you have already done with your title. Considering your title is the first part of the whole campaign the web user will most likely see, always try to put priority on your title’s creation and optimization first and then think about what you an do with the description after.