Rewriting and testing your ad copy may not be the most glamorous way to improve your paid search campaigns, but columnist Jacob Baadsgaard points out that it can be an incredibly effective way to get more bang from your budget.

When it comes to Paid Search, there is a lot to optimize. Amidst all of the keywords, bidding and landing page refinements you have to do on a regular basis, it can be easy to wonder, “Does my ad Copy actually make a difference?”

To make matters worse, there’s nothing exciting about tweaking ad copy. Redesigning a landing page is like creating a piece of art. Eliminating keywords can dramatically cut your cost-per-conversion. But ad copy? Does tweaking a word here or there really make a difference?

As it turns out, the answer is a resounding, “Yes!”

The fact of the matter is, you can have the best targeting and landing pages in the world, but if you’re showing the wrong ad copy to the right audience, no one is going to click on your ads. On the other hand, with the right ad copy, you can get more clicks and more of the right clicks on your ads.

Ad copy matters

We recently took on a new client who was getting decent results from their AdWords campaigns. Decent, but not great. By and large, they had most of the right elements in place… with one exception:

Ad copy.

Now, since everything else was set up right, they were about break-even with their campaigns. However, after taking a look at their ad copy, we knew they could do a lot better than simply “breaking even.”

So, we rebooted their ad copy. We overhauled everything — CTAs, title case, special characters and more — and ensured that their revised text ads were pointing to landing pages that closely matched the new messaging.

It was a fairly simple change, but the results were truly impressive:



In fact, the new ad copy performed so much better that it increased conversion rates (not just click-through rates) by 400 percent. And the cost-per-conversion fell from well over $2,000 to just under $60.

Not too shabby for a few hours’ work.

Now obviously, not every business will get these sorts of results from a few ad copy tweaks. But rewriting and testing your ad copy can be one of the most valuable paid search optimizations you can do.

Rewriting your ad copy

Knowing that rewriting ad copy is important and knowing how to effectively rewrite your ad copy are two entirely different things. Hopefully, I’ve convinced you that you should be rewriting your ad copy, but let’s take a look at how to approach an ad copy rewrite.

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