How well you use the 95 characters spread across three lines (25-35-35) that are available within your Google Ad Text can be all that separates your campaign from being an ongoing costly expense or a cost-effective provider of valuable new prospect leads. However, knowing what copy to write can be a challenge when you are starting out. How can you distil your core benefit down to so few words? And should you lead with a benefit or a feature? All this can cause unnecessary concern and confusion, and result in the creation of those first few ads being a rather haphazard affair.

But this doesn’t have to be the case. I want to share a simple process you can follow to make this ad creation easier. All you need is a few moments of concentration and the use of a tidy FREE online tool from Google. Combine the two and you should be scribbling down good copy ideas in seconds.

The true power of this system comes from its ability to show you an ‘over the shoulder’ view of your prospects. Remember that your searching prospects don’t see your ad in isolation – it is part of a complete page of results (both paid and organic). Both of these areas can change on a frequent basis, especially the paid area, which can change on a daily basis as new advertisers come into the market. The Google ads that are written with an appreciation of the other advertising and copy that sits around them tend to be the ones that lead onto great things. So how do you ensure you can see what your searcher sees?

Well, if you live in the same area as the prospects that your Google AdWords campaign is targeting then it is as simple as keying in your search keyword and noting what comes up. However, things are a bit more difficult for those advertising in markets outside their own location. Fortunately, this is where the free handy tool I mentioned comes into play.

You can find it here: https://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool. You will need to have a valid Google account to make it work, but once you type in the keyword you want to search on, the location of the Google search engine and the location of your searcher, and then submit the form, all will be revealed for you. For instance, see what I find when searching for the keyword ‘laptop computers’ when looking for the .com search engine for those searchers in the US.

If you run a computer store in New Zealand that sells laptops and are wondering what ad text might work you in your Google AdWords account, you could do a lot worse than taking your ideas from those shown in the hyper-competitive US market. Sneaking a look over the fence at others trying to do the same marketing as you but in other markets is just one way you can use this great tool to help make your ad writing an easier task. Here are two other ideas you may want to pick up on.

Look for answers to the problems your prospects have. You may have a strong idea of the key problems your prospects want to solve when they start looking for your product/service. Study the paid and non-paid search results behind your top keywords and see if the true benefits behind these problems are being addressed. For example, people don’t purchase walk-in wardrobes, they purchase storage solutions. I have found that, for some reason, it helps to print out the results page and mark up the areas where these problems are being addressed.

Trick Google into showing you only the high click-through ads. When you are presented with a full page of AdWords ads it can be hard to differentiate which ones are the high click-through winners and as such are worth paying more attention to than the others. You can help yourself here by tricking Google into only showing you the strongest ads. You do this by forcing the Google ad serving engine to show you a broad match result for your target keyword by searching with a term that will always provide a broad match result. For instance, if you are interested in the term mentioned before, ‘laptop computers’, you can reveal the broad match result by entering ‘laptop 8855hyy computers’. See the image to follow for how these results differ slightly to the ones shown previously.

There are many other ways you can use these ‘over the shoulder’ views to further hone your ad copy. By following these few steps this simple tool should ensure that a) you are never stumped for an idea when kicking off your Google Ad text again and, more importantly, b) you produce ad copy with the same view in mind as your prospect sees. Have fun.