In last week’s installment of PPC Copywriting 101, we went over everything you need to know about writing PPC headlines. Now we move onto Google Ads URLs! This might not seem like a super exciting topic, but there is some room to be creative here. You should look at the display URL as an opportunity to add 30 more characters of information to your ad.
First, let’s start with the basics. Your display URL is different from your final URL. When creating an ad, the first field you’ll fill out is the ‘Final URL’. This is where you’ll put the exact URL that you want your ad to bring a searcher to after they click your ad.
The ‘Path’ field is your display URL. This is the URL that searchers will see under your headline text. Google will take the root domain (www.example.com in this example) from your final URL and will give two 15 character path fields. We can see a real example of this with Zappos.
When I search ‘womens heel boots’ the display URL is “www.zappos.com/Boots”. However, this is the final URL that the ad directs you to:
Display URLs are a lot cleaner and can give searchers a better idea on the landing page an ad might bring them to. So now that you know the basics you may be wondering how much you can actually do with 30 characters. You can get creative with this by testing your ads with slightly different URLs to see which version drives the most clicks or conversions. Here are a few different aspects you can test:
Including Keywords
The Display URL is a great place to add your keyword to make sure that searchers know the landing page will be relevant to their search. If you have a keyword that is longer than 15 characters such as “womens steve madden boots” you can use the two path fields to break up this keyword like Off Broadway Shoe Warehouse does here.
This way the searcher has no doubt that they’ll come to a page for Steve Madden boots when they click on this link.
Dynamic Keyword Insertion
Dynamic Keyword Insertion is a Google Ads function that allows you to insert any keyword from an ad group that a user searches. While DKI is commonly used in ad headlines and descriptions, some don’t realize that this can also be useful in the display URL. To set up DKI use the following syntax: {Keyword:default text}. If a keyword is longer than 15 characters it won’t be displayed so it is important to include default text to display in this scenario. Let’s look at an example.
Here I set my second path as {Keyword: Sneakers}. The URL can be displayed as any of the following using this setup:
example.com/Womens/Sneakers (This will also be the default)
example.com/Womens/Tennis-Shoes
example.com/Womens/Running-Shoes
Adding “Official Site”
According to research done by NetElixir, adding “/official-site” to your display URL increases click-through rate by 5%. This addition comes in below 15 characters so it’ll only take up one of your two path fields!
Adding a Call-to-Action
You can also experiment with adding a call-to-action to your display URL such as /Subscribe or /ShopNow. This is definitely worth testing as a CTA encourages searchers to take immediate action.
The New York Times does this in an ad encouraging users to subscribe. As you can see, “Subscribe” is used in both the URL path and in the description to really highlight that call to action.
Changing Up Your Formatting
A Display URL can’t contain spaces so it may be helpful to add dashes or underscores in place of spaces to make the text easier to read. If your path is “WomensShoes” try “Womens-Shoes”, “Womens_Shoes” and “Womens+Shoes” to see which ones has the best results.
Thanks for reading the latest in PPC Copywriting 101! Next week we’ll give our tips and tricks to writing PPC descriptions.
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