Google AdWords Case Study: Text Ad Basics
Today I’m starting a new series. You may remember my AdSense case study almost two years ago where I showed step-by-step how to build a simple informational site (this one was about my experiences with an Invisible Fence brand pet containment system) that is monetized via AdSense. This series is going to be similar, but this time we’re looking at the flipside of the process: using Google AdWords to send targeted traffic to a site. This is not a course on copywriting, rather it’s a course on minimizing your AdWords costs. Getting people to click your ads in the first place is an art that I’m not going to discuss except in passing, although it’s definitely something you should study.
What does AdWords have to do with AdSense? Plenty. The ads you’re showing on your sites as an AdSense publisher all come from AdWords. I’ve always argued that every AdSense publisher should investigate AdWords to properly understand how the entire contextual advertising infrastructure works — see tip #10 on my original AdSense Tips page.
Please note that you’ll get maximum benefit from this case study if you work along with me. This means you’ll need an AdWords account. You’ll need a credit card, but the cost is minimal — it’s $5 to sign up. See my AdWords overview for more information.
We start by looking at the basics.
AdWords Text Ads
When AdWords started, the only ad type you could create was a text ad. These ads would show up (and still do) on the right hand side of Google search results. Since then, of course, Google has greatly expanded the types of ads that AdWords advertisers can publish: image ads, video ads, mobile ads, radio ads, etc. But the default ad format is still the text ad and it’s the format that everyone associates with AdWords. And it’s all we’re going to look at.
An AdWords ad is very simple. It consists of five things: a headline, two description lines, a display URL, and a destination URL:
Here are descriptions of each part:
- The headline is the ad title. It’s what the user clicks to learn more about the offer. The headline is displayed in a larger font and in standard link formatting — blue and underlined. The headline is limited to 25 characters of text.
- The description lines are the next two lines. They provide further details about the offer. Each description line is limited to 35 characters of text.
- The display URL is the full or partial address of the web page ultimately associated with the offer, without the “http://” prefix. When a user clicks the ad, he or she must eventually land on a page (the landing page) whose address (URL) matches the display URL. This line is also limited to 35 characters of text.
- The destination URL is the initial page that the user is sent to after clicking the ad. The destination URL is not shown to the user and consequently can be much longer than the other parts of the ad: the destination URL can be up to 1024 characters long.
As I said before, this is not a course on copywriting, so I’m not going to talk too much about the first three lines of an ad, other than to say that writing good ad copy in such a constrained space (25 characters of title + 70 characters of text) is very hard, especially when you consider the myriad AdWords editorial guidelines that further restrict what you say and how you say it. We will discuss these lines later when we talk about associating ad copy with landing page copy, however, but for now we’re going to focus on the display and destination URLs.
The Display URL
The display URL tells the user where they’re going to end up if they click the ad. If the display URL is not a full or partial match of the actual landing page URL as shown in the browser after the ad is clicked then Google will disable the ad. No deceptive ads, in other words. Marketers try various clever techniques to get around this rule, of course, but most of the time the offending ads don’t stay active very long before being disapproved.
The display URL minimally consists of a domain name, which is the domain name of the site that hosts the landing page. The “www” prefix, if it exists, is usually dropped from the URL, as shown in the example above with “mensa.org”. The URL can be capitalized or not, as you prefer. Thus “Amazon.com” and “amazon.com” are both acceptable. The domain must be valid, however.
The URL of the actual landing page must have the display URL as its prefix, ignoring the initial “www”. In other words, if the display URL is ericgiguere.com/books then the landing page must be something like www.ericgiguere.com/books/j2me/index.html or www.ericgiguere.com/books/midp. The landing page www.ericgiguere.com/about/biography.html is therefore not acceptable because it doesn’t start with ericgiguere.com/books.
Practically speaking, then, the shorter the domain name, the better, because display URLs are limited to 35 characters of text. Including keywords in the display URL (which you do — we’ll see why later) is much easier to do if the domain name is short.
Only Unique Display URLs Are Shown
There’s one important wrinkle with the display URL that is especially important to affiliate marketers. If two or more ads targeting the same keyword use the same domain name in the display URL, Google will display only one of the ads. The best performing ad is chosen, of course. This means that if you try to send traffic to “Amazon.com” and Amazon itself is advertising on those same keywords, your ad probably won’t be shown because Amazon’s ads will normally outrank yours.
We’ll talk more about this later, but it’s important to be aware of this limitation.
The Destination URL
The destination URL is where the user initially lands after clicking the ad. Sometimes this is the actual landing page. In the example above, for example, the destination URL is the “www.mensa.org/stupid” page.
Often, though, the destination URL is not the landing page. The destination URL must ultimately lead to the landing page (via browser redirection) but it may jump through a number of other pages on the way to the landing page. This is often done for tracking and/or analytical purposes.
Say, for example, I wanted to promote a dog training guide called SitStayFetch. Even though the display URL would be “KingdomOfPets.com”, the destination URL would actually be something like www.synclastic.com/dogtraining/sitstayfetch?adgroup=dog+training to funnel the user through my affiliate link for the book via a script I have installed on one of my sites. This ensures that I get credited if they proceed to buy the book. Ultimately, though, they’d land on www.kingdomofpets.com/dogobediencetraining/, which matches the display URL of the ad. (This is assuming that my ad gets shown, of course, something that’s unlikely given that other affiliates would also be targeting the “KingdomOfPets.com” domain and the no-duplicate-domains rule would kick in.)
The destination URL can be anything as long as it’s 1024 character long or less and it eventually redirects to a page that matches the display URL.
Next Time
That’s all we’ll talk about this time. Next time we’ll look at AdWords keyword basics.
If you have any questions, please leave a comment here and I’ll be happy to clarify the material.
Sponsored Link: Purchase the EzineArticles Domination reports and get a free tool I wrote as a bonus.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
Tags
AdSense, AdWords, affiliate, case study, contextual advertising, course, Google, text ads, tips
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5 Responses to “Google AdWords Case Study: Text Ad Basics”
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