Surely you’ve searched Google and noticed the sponsored links that appear in the yellow area above the search results:

These are called Google AdWords. AdWords are a great way to drive instant traffic to your website and generate leads fast. But that’s not what I’m going to talk about today. Instead, I’m going to show you how you can use Google Adwords to figure out what the hell to write in the rest of your advertising.

If you’ve ever been in charge of placing an advertisement for your company, surely you’ve run into the ultimate dilemma: What the %@#! do you say? You’re paying good money for the ad, and naturally, you don’t want it to go to waste. But you have one shot, the bullet is expensive, and there’s no room for error.

The answer you seek is hidden in Google AdWords. Google AdWords allows you to place text-based ads at the top of search results when customers search for certain keywords. If you’re a real estate agent, for example, you can pay to show up every time somebody searches for “foreclosures grande prairie”.

The powerful part is that you can write multiple ads for the same keywords. Google will show them to customers randomly and tell you which ones got the most clicks. The ad with the highest clicks likely contains the best message to use in your advertising!

Using your Google AdWords account, you can try it out. (Of course, you’ll need a website to point the ads to, as well.)

1. Login to your Google AdWords account (you’ll need a Google Account to use it).
2. Set up a new campaign and ad group with the keywords most likely to draw your ideal customer.
3. Now create several ads, each one focusing on one of the potential ideas you have for your ad. Maybe one ad is about quality and service, another is about a free trial or special offer, and the last one is about your latest product.
4. Start your campaign.
5. Let it run for long enough to get statistically significant data. Depending on the keywords, budget, and geographical region, this could take hours or it could take a few days.
6. Remove the ads that aren’t doing as well, and replace them with new ideas.
7. Rinse and repeat until you have 1-3 really solid ads to work with.

You’ll start to see what customers respond to pretty quickly using this method. If your ad about quality and service outshines the others, then likely this is an area you should explore in your other advertising. If it was the free trial or offer, you should consider extending that same offer in other places.

Common sense and caution applies, of course. Just because the ad does really well online doesn’t always mean it will do really well offline. Also, if you tested your message only with text ads, remember that adding color and pictures in your print ad can completely change how customers respond to it. (P.S. You can use Google AdWords to test image ads too, but that’s something for a future article.) 

Even so, it does give you at least some measurable indication of what works and doesn’t work. Having some idea is better than having no idea, right? And who knows, maybe you’ll hit it out of the park on your next print ad.

The great thing about this method is it’s relatively quick, easy, and cheap to do. You can try almost an infinite amount of possibilities for a fraction of the cost of doing it in print, and it’s totally measurable. Even if you find it doesn’t help your print advertising, you’ll get some traffic to your website and maybe land a few leads while doing it.