Sometimes we forget the little things. Like spelling and grammar and how to look professional. I don’t want to sound harsh. We can’t be switched on all the time. I will no doubt make multiple mistakes throughout this blog post because Murphy’s Law dictates that any piece of writing that mentions spelling, grammar or looking professional will be plagued with afflictions.
However! It astounds me when I see AdWords ad copy that indicates the writer bailed on them halfway through or just didn’t put any thought or consideration into them. Why? Because you create an AdWords campaign with the intention of increasing your visibility, getting noticed, directing precious traffic to your website, and getting business. The first thing those potential customers will see and judge your business by is your ad copy. So, why bail on that all-important part of the process?
That hyperbolic rant is about to precede some rather simple comments I want to make on using capitalisation, punctuation and some damn good sense when writing your ad copy. But if nothing else, I love to rant.
Let’s Pick On Some Ads.
Here are some examples appearing under the phrase “Corporate Team Building” on Google:
Dear adventureforlife.com.au, why not capitalise your ad title? Also, you used one full stop, why skimp on another for the second line? That being said the ad copy is short on keywords, unique selling points and calls-to-action. Maybe just start over.
Dear farawaybay.com.au, I don’t know why I’m seeing you under this keyword. If you do want to target this keyword because you believe corporates would love to team-build by visiting Faraway Bay consider writing a corporate team-building ad.
Dear raleighinternational.org, I love what you do as a charitable organisation that facilitates individual and group participation in community projects, but I don’t believe that is conveyed in your ad. Making a real difference sounds like a half-hearted corporate tagline. Also, your ad would look more professional by inter-capitalising your text and using some punctuation.
Inter-Capitalise.
Capitalising the first letter in each word can make your Adwords ad copy appear more professional and eye-catching. There are provisos! If you are using a conversational or informal style, you should consider whether capitalisation detracts from your message. As always, you should test the changes as there are exceptions to every rule… except the rule that says you should test everything.
Here is an example from a test we are conducting at the moment:
Our client had some successful ads that were running prior to our management, and we wanted to be sure that inter-capitalisation would actually be a good thing for them. So we’re doing some split-testing. It’s a bit early to draw conclusions (we prefer to wait until there are 1000 impressions) but you get the idea.
We were once guilty of also capitalising the first letter of each word contained within the display URL but though some tests we discovered this made the URLs look less trustworthy and Google has since banned doing it anyway. You can still capitalise the words after the slash, i.e. www.advia.com.au/PPC-Management, but you need to consider whether it makes your URL look like spam.
Now. Go forth and capitalise.