Ad text is like people. Some ads are really ugly, and some are really attractive! You want to produce ads that (a) are attractive, and (b) attract the right audience, i.e. people that may buy the product.

To produce an attractive ad, you have to get inside the mind of the person searching. What exactly are they looking for? Will the product solve the problem? How will it solve the problem? Once you have answered these questions, you are well on your way to producing an attractive ad.

Google AdWords provides the ability for you to split-test two or more ads. The ads will run together in rotation, and the number of clicks and the click-through rate will be logged. This means that you can compare the performance of two or more ads, and delete the ones with a lower click-through rate (CTR).

Wait until you have a number of clicks before you make any decisions. Statistically, a single click is a random event for all purposes. If you have had one click in 10 impressions, it does suggest that your CTR will be 10%, but maybe the click you received was the one click that you will get in the first 100 impressions. Statistics get a lot more accurate the more tests you perform. I suggest you delay decision making until you've reached 1,000 impressions, and leave it even longer for greater accuracy. (Note that you can only figure out the number of impressions by multiplying the total number of impressions by the served percentage, e.g. if you have had 2,500 impressions overall, and the ad has been served 40.0% of the time, the ad has been shown 1,000 times.)

By the way, make sure you edit the settings of the campaign, and turn off the option to automatically optimise ad serving for your ads. If you don't do this, then Google will keep serving the ad that appears to work better. Whereas this is what you want, you want to be in control of the process! As an aside, while you're at it, it's also worth turning off content network ads. If your ads are displayed on the content network, users have not been searching for the product, and are far more likely to be browsing than buying; they're not even window-shopping!

The best thing to do is to come up with a few different ways to describe the product, play them off against each other, and see which works best.

You want to attract the right audience, too. It's no good if a lot of people click on your ad if they are all looking for free products. To do this, you might want to include the price of the product in your ad. Whether you do this is a judgement call: you will have to revisit the site every now and again to check that the price hasn't changed, and you will get less clicks, but those clicks that you will get will be more likely to convert. What makes it less of a clear-cut decision is that the way Google works, if you have an ad that has a high CTR, you can reduce your bid for the ad, still maintaining its position, and you will get more clicks for your money! I suggest that when you first try a campaign, you include the price of the product. You can experiment with leaving it out later.

Also, it's not necessarily good to be at the top of the sponsored ads. In GoogleCash, Chris Carpenter states that he has found the best conversion rates to have come from people that have gone through the sponsored ads listings and decided to click on his ad. Many more people may click the top ad, but they haven't looked through the list and are less likely to be buyers. He tends to aim for a position somewhere between 4 and 7.

David Thomas, TheAffiliateMarketer.net