So already I have looked into ways advertisers of pay per click advertising can create a great title and description for a PPC search advert. From this, the last area of the search advert to look at is the URL or domain of it. For most advertisers, they will not take much time when it comes to brainstorming and optimizing the URL section of the advert…this is wrong! The URL section of a search advert still has a great influence over the success of the advert and the whole campaign. Therefore, here are a few ways you can make sure to create the best URL for your PPC campaign.

Use an actual domain name

Due to the fact that programs such as Google AdWords allows users to change the domain name to anything they want, there are some advertisers that change the URL to something contextual but competently different to what the actual URL of the landing page is. The best URLs make sure they use the domain of the landing page.

But what about after the ‘.com’?

First things first, you do not want any junk appearing in your URL of your PPC search advert – the junk that appears after domain names is only there to do things such as analyse the data on that page or as a search tool using a hashtag.

Therefore, feel free to to use the area after the ‘.com’ to contextualize the URL to what you are trying to advertise. The best way to describe this is with an example.

If you was creating a marketing campaign for Apple to promote a new device, let’s say the iCar (it might happen!), then a good URL for this would be:

www.apple.com/iCar

This way, the web user addresses that it is apple.com that they can go to for the homepage and apple.com/iCar to get to a product page of the iCar. Using a domain name that neither is real nor directs traffic to your landing page will:

1. Prevent any non-clickers from going directly to your site
2. Confuse web users since the URL is invalid

Don’t remove all junk from the URL

Talking of junk after the ‘.com’, some advertisers may also view the ‘www.’ before the domain to also be deemed as junk. We can all agree that it could be something optionally removed. But would you really want to do that?

• Organic traffic features ‘www.’ before the URL of the web page. Therefore, to make adverts blend in as well as possible with organic traffic, they should also have ‘www.’
• Having ‘www.’ before the domain name makes it crystal clear that it is a URL whereas a domain name without ‘www.’ can be a little harder to recognize as a domain name (even if it is a split second, it still counts).