How to Writing Display URLs

Writing display URLs is not something that’s to be approached like a hit or miss target in your online marketing efforts.   You need to maintain a strong display URL strategy to survive the tough competition in online marketing business.

It takes more than talent to be able to write effective display URLs.  You also need to learn from experts and do some constant practice to achieve your objectives using your strategy.  You will understand this better if you know the basics for now.

A display URL is essentially the website address which appears as the last line of an ad text.  The display URL serves to help show to whom the ad is intended for and to let visitors know where they’d be brought to the moment they’d click on an ad.  A display URL on an ad is limited to 35 characters only.

On the other hand, a destination URL is the link where a visitor is actually brought to once he or she clicks on a display URL.  It can be longer than the display URL, at a maximum of 1024 characters, and can look more complicated too as most are usually long strings of alphanumeric characters.  If you place the destination URL in an ad, it can be very ugly, and would look spammy to an average user.  A more friendly-looking display URL will look more attractive to click on, and this is where a good skill in writing display URL becomes important.

Effective Options in Writing Display URLs

Beyond writing display URLs that are effective, you also need to take an extra mile to learn how to optimize the display URL.  Depending on your objectives, you have a number of options in writing display URL.  Your goal is to make your display URL easy to read and friendly to click on.  A good start is to remove the “http://“ and “www” as these can be distracting.   It is a common knowledge among internet users that any string of text or alphanumeric combination followed by .com (similarly, perhaps with .net and domains with .org too) would refer to a web address, so you can leave the ending.  Though it’s not a hard and fast rule, you always always have the option to remove the prefix.

Effectively writing display URLs will help you improve click through rates on your ads.  To optimize your display URL for keyword search, have relevant words on the display.  For example, if you are trying to sell a Porsche Carrera in your ad, you might want to write the word “Porsche” or “Carrera” or both in your display URL.  Doing this places emphasis on your ad, as Google will highlight these words in search query results.  You may also want to put your keyword in a subdomain.

For the purpose of readability, you might want to use what’s called “camel-case” style in writing.  In the same example of writing an ad to sell a Porsche Carrera, with an example of a destination URL as: http://www.car4sale2day.com/Porsche, instead of writing the display URL to be just like how it is as a destination URL, you can instead write it at the end of your ad as BuyPorscheCarrera.com to better catch a prospect’s attention.  Notice how friendly the latter looks than the former URL.

Why Writing Display URLs Matter

You might be wondering if writing display URLs matters in your ad success.  I take the liberty of writing more about this section as it might need considerable amount of effort to think more about what to write in your ad’s display URL.  All of these concludes to the notion that spending more thought on writing display URL in ads could pay off.  How you write your display URLs affects your click through rates (CTR) as well as your quality score, and eventually your PPC success rate in the long run.

Remember that there is no single formula that works for all types of online business.  Every business needs unique strategies that should come in the right combinations of approaches based on a website’s goals, measure of success, the characteristics of visitors, and the worth of visitors per click to realize ROI.  You are always free to experiment with writing display URL.  Who knows, placing your destination URL as it is on your ad might work better than writing display URL that is thought out longer.  If it is the case, then just go with your gut as your business intuition might lead you to successful discoveries unique to your own business success.