Paid Search: Ads

With keywords covered, let’s now look at ads, and the role they play in paid search. For a brief refresher, ads appear on a search results page (SERP) when a keyword in the same ad group wins an auction. If there’s only on ad in the ad group, that ad will be chosen 100% of the time. If there are multiple ads in the relevant ad group, only one will be chosen to display on the SERP (we’ll cover how that ad is chosen later on).

What actually is an ad?

An ad is made up of lots of different parts. Each part of the ad is listed in the image below:

How do ad headlines work?

Ad headlines are arguably the most important part of your ad. They’re the most visible to the user, meaning they have the most impact on metrics like CTR. They’re also heavily prioritised by search engines when it comes to assessing ad relevance, meaning that you need your headlines to be relevant in order for your ads to be relevant.

Headline 1 in particular is the part of the ad that’s most important for assessing ad relevance. As such, it’s often a good idea to try to map your headline 1 as closely as possible to the keyword(s) in your ad’s ad group.

This isn’t as simple as just putting the keyword in the ad copy. For example, if your keyword is [running shoes buy], you wouldn’t want a…