Marketing ad examples on Google Ads

The recurring strong ad for an agency names both: what it does and who for. A service for a category of business converts far better than a service for everybody, because the reader is trying to work out whether you have done this before in their situation.

It works because specialisation is the main thing a buyer can evaluate from outside, and because a generalist claim in this market is read as an absence of specialisation rather than as breadth.

The recurring waste is bidding broadly on service terms with a generalist ad, which competes with every agency in the country on price and wins the clients who chose on price.

What to check: whether your specialisation is real enough to survive the first call. An ad claiming a niche you have worked in twice produces a call that ends politely and quickly.

For the software half of this industry the same rule applies in a different form: the query names a job — reporting, scheduling, briefing, tracking — and the ad that repeats the job wins the click over the ad that names a category.

The recurring practice that works is narrow ad groups per job, with a landing page per job, and a free way to try the thing. This audience will not book a demonstration to evaluate a tool they could try in ten minutes.

The failure is the platform ad: an all-in-one suite for modern marketing teams, which answers every query equally badly.

What to check: whether your product can be evaluated without a call. In this industry a demonstration requirement is a filter that removes precisely the buyers who are competent enough to be worth having.

Everybody in this market bids on everybody. The queries are expensive and the audience is the one group of buyers who understand exactly what is happening when they see your ad on a rival's name.

The versions that work are matter-of-fact: a named difference, a comparison page that is fair, and no pretence that the query was a coincidence. The versions that fail are coy, or overclaim, and this audience enjoys pointing that out in public.

There is also a norm in parts of this industry about not bidding on the names of agencies you know, which is not a rule and is worth understanding before you ignore it.

What to check: whether your comparison survives a reader who has used both. Many of them have, and several of them write newsletters.

Where the ad is assembled from a pool, the asset is the creative unit and the combinations are the system's choice — which everybody bidding here knows, including about you. What you see of a competitor is one arrangement served to you — and in this industry the competitor knows that you know.

The practice that produces information is assets that differ on one dimension at a time: the specialisation against the service, a price line against a proof line, a speed claim against a capability claim.

The waste is a pool of synonyms for growth, which this industry produces more of than any other and which yields combinations and no learning.

What to check: whether the concrete assets are the ones that serve most often. In this industry they usually are, and the account is usually surprised, having written the abstract ones with more care.

What an expert market does to an auction, what the reports show, and what has to be true of your positioning before a competitor's approach is available to you. The live examples that illustrate each angle come with the ad library.

A bid strategy needs conversions to aim with, and an agency winning a few clients a month does not provide them. Accounts in that position report something earlier or bid manually and accept the work; either is defensible, and quoting a cost per acquisition without saying which is not.

The reports also describe your account rather than the market — a distinction this audience forgets most often when reading its own competitive position out of an impression share column.

The specialisation is what the creative has to repeat, so the structure usually follows it, with tool queries and service queries separated where a business sells both. The recurring failure is a structure built around the seller's service list rather than the buyer's vocabulary, which produces ad groups nobody searches for and a report nobody can act on.

Rarely a better click price. The question is whether the spend reached buyers you can actually serve, and two months at identical cost with different mixes are different months — only one of them produced clients who stayed. That split sits in the search terms report and is almost never read, because it means bucketing hundreds of rows by hand.

Record the specialisation claimed and the job named, follow the click and see whether the page proves either, and date it. Then change exactly one layer and write down the figure that has to be unmoved for the test to have told you anything.

Running several accounts at once makes that reading a standing job rather than a weekly one, and an agent with read access to the connected accounts can hold it continuously. Anything it wants to change is a change request carrying the state it would alter, applied once it is approved by you, or by a rule you wrote, which is also the record a client is owed.

In this industry a large share of new business arrives through a founder's audience, a talk, a newsletter or somebody's recommendation, and much of it lands on a search for the company's own name. That inflates branded performance and makes the account look efficient in a way that has nothing to do with the media. Separating branded from everything else is not an optimisation here so much as an honesty measure, because without it an agency can spend a year believing its advertising works when what works is its reputation.