Although PPC is becoming more automated, good marketing principles remain as important as ever, and always will. The fundamentals are as important as ever.

It's just as important in 2024 to understand your customer and their motivations.

Great copywriting, whether wholly human or AI assisted, will always matter in search advertising.

Understand Your Audience

Take the time to understand your audience before writing anything.

Stepping back before putting pen to paper will give you a clearer understanding of the problems your audience faces, their motivations, and desires.

It’s worth the time as the quality of output will be so much higher.

You’ll be better placed to know which offers, products, and solutions are likely to be most compelling to them.

You won’t simply end up regurgitating product features and benefits, but speaking to your customers on an emotional level. People buy from people, and you’ve got to make people feel like they’re speaking to a human in your advertising.

This is even more important in 2024 as more companies integrate AI into their marketing copy.

Don’t make the mistake that many companies will do, of prioritising the pure efficiency of AI generated content, over the leg work it takes to produce interesting, engaging content.

It’s simply too easy with LLM models to produce high volumes of copy, and you’ll be making . But this doesn’t change the need to understand your audience.

Skip the thinking process and you’re only compelling yourself to produce boring AI drivel...

Create Audience Personas

here will be many types of people buying your products, and their motivations may be very different. Taking time to build out a number of personas.

Take MyProtein for example. They sell thousands of products. Their products cater to many different audiences with varying reasons to purchase their products.

With different motivations come different targeting. Your ad copy is your targeting.

By finding the right buyer with your ad copy, you're filtering out those less likely to purchase, and improving your on-site metrics.

There’s no point having a really high CTR on an ad if the intent is off. The traffic will simply bounce when it gets to your site.

Here’s the 5 Questions I Ask Myself when Creating Audience Personas

Use these questions alongside the frameworks to plan out killer ad copy.

What problem is the product or service we're selling trying to solve?
Why are these things a problem for people? Be emotive. Think in the shoes of the buyer. Why would you buy the product if you were them?
Does it solve more than one problem? If so list them out and rank in priority order
What are the best features or benefits of the product/service? Again rank in priority order. Try and compare these with the competition

Copywriting Frameworks and Marketing Principles for Ad Copy

I always start my ad copy writing process by using copywriting frameworks.

Frameworks are a great way to provide structure to the ad copy writing process, as well as overcome creative roadblocks.

Use one of these in your ad depending on the type of ad you need.

Combine these with the tried and tested principles for high converting ad copy

AIDA: Attention, Interest, Desire, Action

Attention: Grab attention with a strong headline.

Interest: Generate interest by focusing on the benefits and features of the product.

Desire: Build desire by showing how the product will solve a problem

Action: Direct them to take a specific action ← In this case purchase

PAS: Problem, Agitate, Solution

Problem: Identify a problem that the target audience is facing.

Agitate: Agitate the problem by discussing the consequences or discomforts associated with it. This step is about making the audience recognise the pain or discomfort.

Solution: Present your product or service as the solution to the problem. Highlight how it alleviates the pain or solves the issue.

FAB: Features, Advantages, Benefits

Features: Describe the features of the product. These are the factual statements about what the product is and does.

Advantages: Explain the advantages of these features. How the features make the product unique or superior to competitors.

Benefits: Illustrate the benefits that these features and advantages bring to the customer to improve the customer's life or solve their problems

Marketing Principles for Killer Ad Copy

Frameworks alone are boring. The second thing I think about is utilising tried and tested marketing principles that pique interest, trigger emotion, and drive engagement.

The Teasing Effect

Don’t give away 100% upfront. Reel your audience in with incomplete information. This is the classic ‘hook’ in an ad. This is known as the teasing effect.

Negation

This involves using words with negative connotations. These have been shown to have a higher propensity to drive users to action than positive words.

For example use ‘don’t miss out’ or ‘don’t forget’ rather than ‘remember to check’

Use Metaphors to Make your Ads Memorable

Rather than just driving a click, marketers should be concerned with memorability. Although this is more akin to a brand marketing metric, I’d argue it matters in performance advertising too.

We know a large proportion of conversions happen post click, days later, off the initial ad platform of exposure.

Making your ads more memorable means someone may be more likely to remember your brand name and find your site later down the line.

Ad Copy Best Practices

Use Short, Common, Concrete Words

You have milliseconds to capture attention. Get to the point. Fast.

Google Ads has very short character limits, people are often on the go and need to quickly know that they’ve found what they’re looking for

Use short, simple sentences with an active voice. This will make your writing seem punchy and powerful

Now isn’t the time for overly descriptive sentences. It’s unnecessary and could actually be detrimental to your performance.

Let people quickly understand what you’re offering and how you can help them. Don’t demand high cognitive processing by using long sentences or verbose adjectives.

To Keep your Readers’ Attention, Keep your Tone Excited, or Hopeful

People are more likely to continue reading if their emotions are stirred up, compared with language that’s less stimulating—or just sad.

This is in part why social media is so engaging, as the algorithms know how to feed intrigue, anxiety and outrage.

Again, you only have 30 or 90 characters to spur excitement or hope with your ad.

Speak to the emotive benefit the customer could get from purchasing your product.

Platform Specific Ad Copy Rules for Google Ads

There are actually 2 main components of a Responsive Search Ad - Headline and description (not including sitelinks and structured snippets - more on that later)

RSAs now mean you need fewer ads (with more headlines) per ad group.

This limits control of how your ad will display (though you can still pin headlines), and means you may be covering multiple buyer personas per ad group.

However I like to break these down into a third, call to action. Visualise how all 3 elements fit together to create your ad and try not to consider elements individually.

Make your call to action specific to the niche you’re targeting - e.g. “Buy Now” is more appropriate for e-commerce than “Sign Up Now”

Headlines and Descriptions

Headlines are max 30 characters and you can use up to 15 of them.

Descriptions are max 90 characters and you can use up to 4 of them.

With Expanded Text Ads you could have 3 really specific headlines, tailored to one buyer persona. You could then have 3-4 per ad group, ensuring all your buyer personas and angles were covered.

I recommend keeping 1-2 RSAs per ad group. Really you would just need 1, but a 2nd allows you to split test different ads. Where you keep some headlines the same (e.g. CTAs), and change others.

You can also keep one which appeals to one buyer persona and then another for a different one.

You could also use a separate one whenever you run a sale/promotions so that sale copy is kept separate from non-sale copy, and you can fairly analyse performance.

Keep your Ad Copy Relevant to the Landing Page

You want the searcher to have complete clarity on the ad they’re visiting when they click your ad.

This is just as important once they reach your site. Let them know they’re in the right place. They may have searched for a generic term and are now landing on a page which shows something slightly different.

Picture this → Search “dumbbell sets” → Click → Land on category page for ‘Weights & Bars”

Not ideal is it? Sending traffic to the ‘Dumbbells” category page is more relevant and shows the range of items the searcher was looking for.

Forget site relevance and you’ll lower the user's experience when they reach your site. This in turn will lower your quality score, increase ad costs, and ability to win in the auction.

Through testing your ad copy and optimising your headlines and descriptions, so they’re punchy

Utilise Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI)

I always use DKI in my ads now. DKI allows you to insert the keyword a user searches and place it into your ad as a headline. The result? Higher relevance to the users → Higher CTR

With best practice for ad groups to now group them thematically, you may have a high number of keywords in an ad group.

DKI keeps your ad relevant to a wide range of keywords.

Be careful, as this combined with broad match can lead to irrelevant traffic, as you are effectively adding a headline for a product that you might not range.

As always, check your search terms for relevance and add negatives.