There’s no mag­ic bul­let to ads that con­vert like crazy; you have to get each of the mov­ing parts work­ing togeth­er. When you do, though, the pay­off is high­er con­ver­sions, low­er CPCs and a way bet­ter ROI for your Google AdWords cam­paign as a whole.

Ad con­ver­sion rates are large­ly depen­dent on oth­er fac­tors, notably your key­word selec­tion strat­e­gy and the effec­tive­ness of your land­ing pages. But even with those fac­tors in place, here are a few cre­ative PPC ad writ­ing tricks you can use to boost your con­ver­sion rates like crazy.

1. Use Google Shopping Ads For Ecommerce

Google Shop­ping Ads, or PLAs, are a pow­er­ful ad for­mat. Not only are they high­ly visu­al and stand out in the search results, but they are a valu­able source of infor­ma­tion for com­par­i­son shop­pers.

Poten­tial buy­ers can see the prod­uct image, price, and the store name; click­ing through on the ad when they already have this infor­ma­tion shows great com­mer­cial intent. It’s like the ad view­er is say­ing, “Alright, I like how this looks and the price has­n’t scared me away. Take me to the retail­er!”

Google’s search results for queries with com­mer­cial intent are seri­ous­ly ad-heavy. Yes, it’s great to be in one of those top text ad posi­tion, but look at the space the PLAs take up! The image and pric­ing give that dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion that encour­ages clicks and can give con­ver­sions a big boost.

2. Use Image Extensions For Lead Generation

For the same rea­son PLAs rock for ecom­merce, image exten­sions are incred­i­ble con­ver­sion boost­ers for any­one using ads for lead gen­er­a­tion.

Think of prod­ucts in the trav­el or auto­mo­tive indus­try, those you can’t yet buy using PLAs. Using image exten­sions in AdWords allows you to show­case your beau­ti­ful vaca­tion des­ti­na­tion or lux­u­ry car using image ads vs. text ads.

Soft­ware com­pa­nies could fea­ture screen­shots, a real estate com­pa­ny could show pic­tures of the home – any­where an image could help con­vert or con­vince a buy­er, you can use image exten­sions in ads.

Image exten­sions let you con­vey in a rich, visu­al­ly appeal­ing way the same mes­sage a text-only ad only gives you 95 char­ac­ters to get across. Con­sumers are already mak­ing a deci­sion about whether they’re inter­est­ed, before they ever click on your ad (and cost you mon­ey).

You can use these images to pre-qual­i­fy prospects and reduce wast­ed clicks by using prod­uct or ser­vice-spe­cif­ic images. This abil­i­ty to weed out dis­in­ter­est­ed click­ers helps you improve con­ver­sion and the over­all ROI of your cam­paign.

3. Get Right With Mobile PPC With Ads That Generate More Calls

Calls to your busi­ness are worth way more than clicks to your web­site. A per­son click­ing through on an ad to call you is show­ing strong com­mer­cial intent and you can tap into the imme­di­a­cy of their need. We know that com­mer­cial inter­est decays over time, so if you’re send­ing peo­ple to your web­site over hav­ing them call you, you’re throw­ing con­ver­sions out the door!

Do any­thing you can to get more calls. Force head­line clicks to pop up the click-to-call num­ber. Try remov­ing your web­site link from your mobile ads and just leave the click-to-call. Why send some­one to your mobile land­ing page and try to con­vert them from there when you could have con­vert­ed them right from the ad?

Use your ad text and sitelinks to encour­age peo­ple to call you imme­di­ate­ly. Focus on your call rates and tweak your copy to con­vert more mobile ad view­ers to callers.

4. Use Remarketing Ads Like Crazy

In gen­er­al, con­ver­sion rates suck and are typ­i­cal­ly in the sin­gle dig­its range. Remar­ket­ing lets you turn that once chance to con­vert a con­sumer into 50 or 100 chances, or more! Remar­ket­ing with Google AdWords opens the door to recap­tur­ing your lost web traf­fic across the AdSense Pub­lish­er Net­work, Dou­bleClick Ad Exchange, and Google O&O prop­er­ties – the entire Google Dis­play Net­work, which gives you 92 per­cent reach across the U.S.

Make sure you seg­ment out your tagged web traf­fic and tar­get each audi­ence with ad copy that makes sense. For exam­ple, you can tar­get peo­ple who vis­it­ed a spe­cif­ic prod­uct page with offers on that prod­uct, where­as a per­son who just vis­it­ed your home­page and bounced will need a dif­fer­ent offer to entice them to come back and check you out.

Be aggres­sive with your remar­ket­ing fre­quen­cy caps and mem­ber­ship dura­tions. We’ve found that as peo­ple view the same retar­get­ing ad mul­ti­ple times, the click-through rate goes down – but those who do click on the ad are more like­ly to con­vert.

Bonus Ad Writing Tip: Say No To A Low CTR Strategy

There’s this crazy the­o­ry out there that you should try to keep your CTR low by writ­ing ads that dis­cour­age clicks. Don’t do it! There are way bet­ter meth­ods of tar­get­ing the right audi­ence and qual­i­fy­ing leads than writ­ing crap­py ads you don’t actu­al­ly want peo­ple to click.

Google rewards high CTRs with a bet­ter qual­i­ty score, which low­ers your costs per click and gets you bet­ter ad place­ment and much high­er impres­sion share. Now turn that on its head and you’ll see why a low CTR strat­e­gy is a ter­ri­ble thing to do to your cam­paign.

Google actu­al­ly penal­izes adver­tis­ers with low­er than aver­age CTRs by mak­ing them pay more for the clicks they do get. The penal­ty is huge – basi­cal­ly, you’re going to pay up to 400 per­cent more for clicks and will be ban­ished to the low­er ad spots, where it’s almost like you aren’t even run­ning a PPC cam­paign at all.

Be picky. Choose a nar­row set of key­words with high com­mer­cial intent, with high rel­e­vance to your prod­ucts or ser­vices.

Write ad copy designed to draw clicks. You’ll pay more for the greater vol­ume of clicks and your con­ver­sion rate from ad view to click might even be low­er – but your costs per click will be much low­er and you’ll more than make up for it in your total cost per con­ver­sion.