Not using your extensions properly
You will notice that a resounding trend throughout this article will focus on circumventing the biggest difficulty of ad copies. Namely, we are talking about a lack of space, and limited words. You need to be careful, you can’t spam, and you mustn’t overstuff the thing with keywords. Know that recovering from a Google penalty is bad enough, but you also won’t achieve much even if you avoid one with spammy links and overstuffed ad copies. This is where extensions come in.
Extensions can give you that vital extra room and can give potential users some extra information that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to give. For example, you can get structured snippets. You can present some extra information with snippets, presented as a list. This gives you the opportunity to organically present an extended amount of information into multiple bit sized chunks. You can also place callout extensions, which provide an organic and natural space for keywords, without overstuffing the main text.
Simply put – extensions are a useful tool, and not using them is a grave mistake.
Not communicating your (client’s) needs
Every business is different, and you can’t just use a cookie cutter formula for every single one of them. You need to communicate, to talk. A furniture salesman in Brisbane is not going to want the same ad as an IT startup in Canberra. Avoid formulaic ads, actually put some effort into them. And this is important if you’re writing the ads from your own company. Different departments, services, and products require different ads.Not experimenting
Experimentation is a vital part of any type of success. You need to take risks, you need to try out new things if you want to get the best result possible. Who knows what kind of crazy success you can achieve with some new feature. You can ask Australian PPC marketing experts, they will tell you that playing it safe is useful to a certain extent, but if you want to grow, you need to take some risks from time to time.New ad variants pop up continually. Things like expanded text ads were unheard of couple of years ago, now they’re practically everywhere. New formats, new extensions, they all at the very least deserve a test run.
Keyword stuffing
What makes ad copies so difficult to create and maintain is that they only have a limited amount of space. You need to choose your words carefully, you need to focus. Things need to be narrowed down. For example, you might be based in Sydney, and want to advertise. It’s enough to write New South Wales, Sydney, or just Sydney, Australia. Putting both in will complicate matters, and will just waste valuable space and words. And you need that space for keywords, after all.We understand the need to put as many keywords as possible. After all, they do improve your conversation rates and your rankings. The issue here is that putting too many will lead to two problems. First, you may end up being penalized by Google. The second one, however, is direr (and more obvious). Namely, the ad just won’t make any sense. It will sound fake, ugly, and purposefully made for SEO purposes only, not for actually advertising a product or service.
Not putting a call to action
Sadly, a very common (and confusing) error that seems to occur with many people is a lack of a call to action. We understand that you want to focus the text of the ad onto providing extra information, but calls to action are important and ubiquitous for a good reason. They serve as that last little extra nudge that will get a user to click on the ad.By adding a call to action you push your users into the direction you want, you tell them what you want them to do. The thing to keep in mind here is that they already want something. And it’s up to you, using your ad copy, to convince them that you really have that something. Finally, you use your call to action to show them how to get that something from you.
