PreviewMyPPC.com – preview your ppc ads on the 3 major search engines
When I’m creating Pay Per Click campaigns, the most important thing to me is creating compelling ad copy that will provoke users to click on my ads.
If this wasn’t difficult enough then you also have to work within the guidelines of the paid search engine you are working on. So for Google AdWords for example you are limited to only 25 characters for the title and 70 characters in total for the description.In the past I’ve always used Microsoft Word to write my ppc ads so I can use the word count tool to count the characters, but to be honest this is a bit of a pain, and well just a bit messy.
Google AdWords do have their own preview tool but it only displays ads as they would appear on the right hand side of the Google search results page. It doesn’t preview them as they would appear if you get one of the sponsored ad slots that appear on the top of the page, above the main search terms. These are displayed slightly differently as the description fields are merged into one and displayed on 1 line, not 2.
And as far as I am aware Yahoo! and Microsoft AdCenter don’t have any stand alone preview tools, so I thought to myself, “hey wouldn’t it be cool if there was a site where I could write and preview my ppc ads for all 3 major search engines?” So I went and built one.
Introducing PreviewMyPPC.com
PreviewMyPPC.com is a free resource where you can write, edit and preview how your paid search ads will appear on Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter.
The site has just been launched, and is in a “beta” release so if you see and bugs then please drop me a line and I’ll get them fixed. Also, if you can think of any improvements then I’d love to hear them. All feedback is most welcome in fact, please leave a comment below.
What I’m listening to right now: Chrisette Michele – “I Am”
Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 9:55 pm and is filed under PPC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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[...] Kieron Donoghue, the North-East’s most famous Peroni-drinker (excluding Gazza obviously!) has launched a fantastic new tool, which I think will prove to be invaluable to anyone doing PPC. [...]
Welcome to my blog. My name is Kieron Donoghue and I run UK Offer Media Ltd. I thought it would be fun to post a daily (well hopefully daily) blog, writing about my experiences in Internet Marketing and more specifically Affiliate Marketing. I'll include some personal stuff too, probably about my other passions, music and cars. Please feel free to post your comments and thoughts too.
Hi Kieron - this is a great idea as like you suggest, the ad text is important can make or break a campaign.
One quick suggestion - if I type my ad into the Google section and then move over to the Yahoo/MSN section, would it be possible to transfer the ad text over – it’s just some people may wish to use very similar ads but want to slightly tweak certain fields where additional text is available.
Good luck.
Looks good Keiron. Cheers. Now if only you could build in a way to preview which ads Microsoft will randomly reject for no good reason it’d save me a heck of a lot of time!
Cool - looks good.
I agree with Dave and some clever scripting should solve this.
I notice that you have added a Yahoo referral link but not an AdWords referral link - deliberate or oversight?
Dave - sure will give that idea some thought.
David Fiske - Deliberate, just not worth it for the pennies that Google offer affiliates for recruiting new users to AdWords.
Thanks for the feedback and kind words guys.
We are looking into how to implement some functionality whereby the ad is copied across all 3 preview pages. There are a few challenges here, i.e. Google only allow 25 characters in the title and Yahoo! allow 40. But am sure we will get round them.
I also don’t want to scare off anyone paranoid enough to think we are stealing their ppc ads (as if). So am trying to find ways to display the same ad across all 3 preview pages without using a “submit” button. Fun and games!
Site looks great but cant help thinking the tool is a little bit pointless? is the key function really just to see how your add looks in the respective fonts and style of the key search engines, surely most PPC marketers now how to measure the number of characters in add by a simple excel formula and it doesn’t take a genius to visualize and ad?
Hopefully you’ll be adding additonal functionality that could be usefull to marketers - maybe the ad preview tool on google?
Mongoose - thanks for your feedback.
The whole point of the tool is that you don’t have to mess about with Excel spreadsheets, Word documents or anything like that. And there is a whole world of difference between seeing an ad written in plain text in a spreadsheet and how it would look displayed “live”. There are many subtle tricks you can employ when creating ppc ads to draw users attention to the ad and in my personal experience you can’t do that in Excel or Word or whatever.
Ok I guess the proof will be in how many people use it regulary, personally I like to save all of my creative in a spread sheet and line them against each other to compare ect
It’ll be great when the ad text “moves” from one tab to the other. Nice to see you’re not having a nose at other peoples PPC target Keiron!
As a futures idea you could have a bash at including dynamic keyword insertion too - how many people get that one not quite right!
This is actually great. You can get an idea on how your ads will do on the real search engine.
Kieron. I read this post when you first published it and just wanted to ask how you are getting on with it? Has it panned out as you expected and are there any developments in the pipeline?
I thought this tool was pointless when I saw it. But during the past weeks I’ve found myself coming back to it time and time again:D
Just a suggestion Kieron. I couldn’t remember the domain name last time and tried ‘previewppcads.com’. It might be worth getting that.
Zin,
wackimonki on a4u