Google AdWords™ For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Understanding the Three Goals of Your Ad

A good ad attracts the right people — your best prospects — to your website. Your ad has three goals:

• Generate clicks from qualified visitors.
• Discourage the people who are unlikely to become your customers from clicking your ad.
• Set your prospects' expectations so that your website satisfies (and possibly even delights) them.

The following sections discuss these three goals in detail.

Attracting the right prospects

The AdWords medium encourages a stepladder approach. The job of the ad is to deliver drooling prospects to your website. Prospects don't even have to be drooling over what you want to sell them — just over what you're offering them in the ad. Sometimes the ad offer and the first sale are identical — selling a product they're searching for by name and model. Other times, you're dangling a magnet that will attract the quarters and ignore the wooden nickel.

Your four-line ad can't make a sale, any more than a door-to-door salesperson can ring the doorbell, utter one sentence, and sell a $1,000 vacuum cleaner. The first sentence is meant to make the prospect listen to the second sentence. Likewise, the Google ad isn't long enough to capture the prospects' attention, pique their interest, stoke their desire, and make them pull out their credit card. Let your website, e-mails, and phone calls accomplish the heavy lifting. Craft your ...