Writing Ad Copy for Considered Purchases

Most advertising advice assumes the purchase is quick and the click is cheap. Write for the emotion, keep the friction low, let volume do the work. For a considered purchase — a property, a fitted kitchen, an enterprise contract, a watch — every one of those instincts is wrong. The click costs several times more, the decision takes weeks, and the person who converts today first saw you a month ago.

The copy has to do a different job. It is not there to win the click. It is there to win the right click and lose the rest.

Qualify in the headline

The single largest improvement available in most accounts is putting a qualifying fact where it cannot be missed. A price floor, a minimum order, a segment, a credential. Something that makes the wrong reader stop.

Click-through rate drops when you do this. That is the mechanism working, not failing. What matters is cost per qualified enquiry, and it usually improves — the spend that was buying unqualified traffic is buying nothing instead, which is an improvement.

The objection is always the same: a lower click-through rate hurts Quality Score, which raises the cost per click. It does, slightly. It does not raise it as much as unqualified clicks raise your cost per sale. If you want the arithmetic behind that trade, it is the same one we set out in buying high purchase intent.

Write to the stage, not to the keyword

Someone searching a category term and someone searching your brand with a comparison word are at opposite ends of the same decision, and the same ad serves neither well.

• Early stage — the reader is establishing what the category costs and who is credible. Copy should teach and qualify. Landing on a contact form is premature.
• Middle — comparison. This is where proof earns its place: a credential, a specific number, an authorised status. Vagueness loses here, and it loses quietly.
• Late — the reader has decided and is checking. Copy should remove the last obstacle: availability, the next step, what happens after the enquiry.

If the campaign structure does not separate these, the copy cannot either. That separation is the first thing we build in PPC management.

Proof beats adjectives, and specificity beats proof

“Trusted”, “leading” and “bespoke” appear in every competitor’s ad and are therefore invisible. A number is not. So is a constraint: a lead time, a minimum, a named certification, a guarantee with a term attached.

The test is whether a competitor could paste your line into their own ad without lying. If they could, it is not copy — it is filler occupying a position you are paying for.

The ad and the page are one unit

An ad that promises a specific thing and a page that opens with a generic welcome loses most of what the ad won. The claim in the headline should be the first thing above the fold, in the same words. Not similar words. The same ones.

This is the cheapest fix in most accounts and the most frequently skipped, because it sits between two teams. It is also why we build and host landing pages ourselves rather than waiting for a queue elsewhere.

Negative keywords are copy decisions

Every term you exclude is a statement about who you are not for. Free, cheap, DIY, jobs, salary, template, course — the standard list removes obvious waste. The valuable list is specific to you: the adjacent product you do not sell, the segment you cannot serve profitably, the competitor whose customers never convert.

That list cannot be written from the interface. It comes from the search terms report, read monthly, by someone who knows what a good customer looks like.

What to measure

Click-through rate tells you whether the ad is attractive. It does not tell you whether it is correct. The numbers that matter are cost per qualified enquiry and the share of enquiries the sales team calls twice — and neither is visible unless the measurement is built for it, which is the subject of conversion tracking.

Test one variable at a time, and give it long enough to be readable. On a considered purchase that is rarely under six weeks. Most copy tests are called at three and conclude nothing.

If you are writing ads for something expensive and slow, a Google Ads management engagement starts with a thirty-minute call about your margins and your segment — because the copy is downstream of both.