Free PPC Ad Templates

Everybody has a different way of writing their PPC ads, and some ways are more efficient than others. Seeing some of the confusion over what method is easiest to write ads, I thought it might be nice to share the method that’s worked for me for years.

My experience has been that many people just type their ads in to the ad platform (such as AdWords), and attempt to construct an ad that fits. This has the advantage of counting the characters as you type, but has the disadvantage of creating a focus on ad length instead ad effectiveness. If you are concentrating on the characters counting down, you may not be focussing on the quality of the ad.

Others prefer to write ads out in Word and count the characters. This has the advantage of being able to write your message first, and then make it fit after. The drawback is that, unless you are very experienced in writing ads, you have to write first with no real idea of how much space you have, and then cram, cram and cut words later until you can make the text fit.

The method that I personally prefer, which balances out a focus on ad effectiveness with ad length, is to use the simple, humble text file. If you can use a plain vanilla text editor (such as Notepad) that uses a fixed-width font (such as Courier or Lucida Console), you can take advantage of this method.

Download the following file, and take a look inside - and remember, you must view it with a fixed-width font, so just go ahead and open it in Notepad (unless you have customized your Notepad fonts, in which case you will have to customize them back).

Download PPC Ad Template

As you can see, you can use the guidelines to have a clear visual idea, right on the page, of how much space you have to write your message. Does your ad go over? No problem - just edit it and move the text around. In the case of the Google ad, you can visually see the structure your ad will have in terms of lines wrapping, etc.

One of the most fundamental steps in writing effective ads is to determine your strategy first - Both WHO you are addressing, and HOW is best to address them. Create your ad messaging first, and make it fit into the allowed space after, and you are on your way to creating more effective ads.