ad copy

Ad copy is the words in the ad itself, the headline lines and the description someone reads in the half second before deciding whether to click. On a results page crowded with other ads, a map listing and organic results all competing for the same attention, the copy is often the entire difference between an ad that gets clicked and one that gets scrolled past.

Good ad copy is specific. It says something a search results page full of competitors is not already saying, whether that is a genuine point of difference, a clear answer to what the person is searching for, or a plain statement of what happens next if they click. Vague, generic copy, “quality service, call today,” blends into every other ad on the page and gives someone no reason to pick you over the next listing.

Ad copy is one of the three things behind Quality Score, alongside keyword relevance and landing page experience, so it affects not just whether people click but what you pay for the click in the first place.

Why it matters to you

Two businesses can spend the exact same amount on Google Ads and get very different results, purely because of what the ad actually says. Weak copy wastes impressions on people who scroll past without clicking. Strong copy turns the same impressions into more clicks, and often into better-matched clicks, from people who already know roughly what they are getting.

It also matters because ad copy is one of the few parts of a campaign you can change quickly and cheaply, without touching the budget or the keyword list, to see a real difference in performance.

How I write it

I write ad copy around one specific thing the business can honestly say that a generic competitor cannot, rather than trying to cram every possible selling point into two short lines. I keep it tied closely to the keyword it is running against, so someone searching for a specific service sees an ad that speaks directly to that search rather than a broad, one-size-fits-all message.

I also run more than one version of an ad against the same keywords where the volume supports it, and let click-through rate tell me which version is actually working rather than guessing from a desk. Copy that tests well stays. Copy that does not gets replaced.

What it looks like in practice

In a Google Ads account, ad copy shows up as the headlines and descriptions attached to each ad, usually with a few variations running side by side so Google can rotate them and show whichever performs better. I review these regularly rather than writing them once and leaving them untouched for years.

A stale ad that has run unchanged for a long time is one of the more common things I find when taking over an account someone else set up. Refreshing the wording, even without changing the budget or the keywords underneath it, is often one of the fastest improvements available in an existing campaign.