The num­ber of times I have writ­ten an ad that I thought was awe­some only to find out I had hit 36 char­ac­ters on a descrip­tion line is enough to drive a per­son totally mental.

So how do you write good ad copy for B2B? The answer starts with know­ing the goals of each cam­paign and work­ing back­wards. What is the action that you want the per­son to take on your site and how does the land­ing page relate to that end goal and then how do we trans­late that into your ad mes­sage. Your ad mes­sage is the first part of a con­tin­u­ous mar­ket­ing mes­sage that lasts right through to the con­ver­sion; yet it has to be com­pelling enough to stand out on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) and entice some­one to click on it.

Addi­tion­ally, at the risk of sound­ing a lit­tle too much like Sun Tzu, know­ing your com­pet­i­tive advan­tage or value propo­si­tion against that of your com­peti­tors is extremely impor­tant. This fact can be a great dif­fer­en­tia­tor on the SERPs and con­tribute to a higher click through rate (CTR). How­ever, your com­pet­i­tive advan­tage should be some­thing that speaks directly to your cus­tomers’ known needs. More­over, and this is a great exer­cise for mar­keters doing brand­ing cam­paigns – can you com­mu­ni­cate your com­pet­i­tive advan­tage in a few brief words that your cus­tomers would actu­ally iden­tify with?

Let’s exam­ine some key con­sid­er­a­tions when writ­ing your ad copy and then look at some best practices.

Infor­ma­tion Scent: When a searcher is enter­ing in a search query into a search engine, they are auto­mat­i­cally devel­op­ing a seman­tic map of related ter­mi­nol­ogy. This process con­tin­ues as the searcher scans the search results page for areas where we see the high­est con­cen­tra­tion of those related ter­mi­nol­ogy, the area of great­est promise. This is where the user will start to con­cen­trate their search efforts. With ad copy, it is impor­tant to know the related ter­mi­nol­ogy asso­ci­ated to your prod­uct and lever­age that within the ad copy. For exam­ple, if you are sell­ing lead man­age­ment soft­ware, the inclu­sion of key­words such as soft­ware, demo, appli­ca­tion into the ad copy would increase the infor­ma­tion scent with the ads.

Front Load Your Ad: Most scan­ning activ­ity is con­cen­trated on the left side of the page and there­fore, think­ing about how your ad copy will appear on the search results, it is impor­tant to include impor­tant key­words as much as pos­si­ble near the begin­ning of the head­lines and descrip­tion lines where it is most likely to be seen.

Use Hid­den Key­words: Hid­den key­words are the terms that act like trig­gers to entice action or visual cues aligned with the per­sua­sive mes­sage of the ad. Hid­den key­words are those terms /phrases that will increase the per­cep­tion of trust such as social proof, demos, com­par­i­son guides or reviews.

Treat your Titles like Gold: Your title is one of the most impor­tant ele­ments of the ad. Where pos­si­ble, lever­age your title and key­words together to cre­ate a stronger call to action or posi­tion­ing state­ment. For exam­ple if the key­word was CRM Soft­ware, sim­ply using that key­word within the title will increase hit bold­ing, but com­bin­ing that key­word with a call-to-action or posi­tion­ing state­ment can sig­nif­i­cantly power of that ad such as “World’s Most Pop­u­lar CRM” or “Com­pare Top 40 CRM Apps.”

Break Up Text Pat­terns: SERPs can appear to be rather text heavy, the inclu­sion of num­bers and sym­bols can break up the text pat­tern and visu­ally attract the eye.

Pre­qual­ify the vis­i­tor with your ad copy as much as pos­si­ble. Sev­eral prod­ucts for B2B have sig­nif­i­cant cross-over with similar-use prod­ucts for B2C pur­chases. The com­mon­al­i­ties between the terms may not be eas­ily dis­tin­guish­able, if at all, there­fore includ­ing business-focused mes­sag­ing in the ad copy will assist with pre­qual­i­fi­ca­tion of the searcher. Although this tac­tic will most likely drop CTR and there­fore drop qual­ity score, the increase in con­ver­sion rates should off­set the prospect of a higher CPC. How­ever, if con­sumers can still pur­chase from your site and the prod­ucts are sim­i­lar, you may want to test this out and mea­sure the impact on CTR with that on con­ver­sion. The goal should be to main­tain an appro­pri­ate cost per con­ver­sion and ROAS.

Best Prac­tices and Tricks: Ensure ads remain action ori­ented towards the action that you want the user to take.

• Ads should relate to search intention.
• Ads should con­tain key­words or seman­ti­cally related words within the ad copy. Increase the “infor­ma­tion scent of the ad as much as possible.”
• Include spe­cial offers, if pos­si­ble, within the copy for dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion on the page.
• Use cau­tion with Dynamic Key­word Inser­tion (DKI).

         - All key­words and ad copy MUST make sense together to effec­tively lever­age DKI.
         - The most effec­tive and eas­ier place for DKI is the Title

• Use only Com­monly Accepted acronyms or shorthand.

         - Be aware of alter­na­tive mean­ings for acronyms

• CRM = cus­tomer rela­tion­ship man­age­ment, crew resource man­age­ment, cer­ti­fied records man­ager, and 6 other meanings
• Use amper­sands to increase avail­able characters
• Use Trade­mark Symbols
• Use Spe­cific Num­bers for dis­counts, prices, or rankings
• Use proper sen­tence struc­ture, grammar
• Do not over use punc­tu­a­tion – com­mon rea­son for ad disapproval
• Use known Brand names within the copy if pos­si­bleIn­clude key­words into dis­play URL, if appropriate
• Test, Test, Test

• Lever­age a test­ing frame­work to iden­tify ele­ments within the ad copy that you want to test and design an exper­i­ment to test each ele­ment. With each ad ele­ment that you are test­ing, ensure that all other ele­ments remain con­sis­tent to ensure that the only vari­able in the test is the one you are testing.
• Ensure that multi-variate tests are sup­ported by suf­fi­cient vol­ume to ensure that tests are not drawn out. A/B Test­ing is usu­ally a more sim­plis­tic imple­men­ta­tion and faster data col­lec­tion period.
• Test ads by rotat­ing evenly in the search engines. Opti­miz­ing for clicks will not yield sta­tis­ti­cally rel­e­vant results due to the bias intro­duced by the skewed dis­tri­b­u­tion of impressions.

Biography / Resume : Kyle joined Mediative about 5 ½ years ago and has been working as a Performance Media Strategist since that time. Kyle has worked with some of Mediative’s largest Paid Search accounts; managing accounts in excess of 1 million keywords and a monthly spend of over $1 million. He is able to combine his skills in data analysis and marketing ability to develop highly targeted ad messaging and campaigns, aiming to not only access the correct target market, but to speak to them with the right language. Although, his largest accounts have been in the B2B e-commerce space, Kyle has also successfully managed lead generation and branding campaigns in both the B2C and B2B markets. During his tenure at Mediative, Kyle has gained in-depth experience on a multitude of Analytics and bid management platforms such as Google Analytics, CoreMetrics, Omniture, Marin Software and Acquisio.