How to Create Your Paid Ads

How to Create Your Paid Ads

Your main goals for your ads are conversions, for more traffic to your landing pages, and hopefully more conversions into subscribers or customers.

Ads that get a high click rate will also be rewarded by most ad networks, being shown more often, in a better position, and/or being given a lower price per click.

Google AdWords and Facebook also award a “relevance score,” rewarding ads that match the keywords that you are using to run the ads. That is why it is a good idea to group your keywords tightly, and to use your chosen keywords in certain key places in your ad.

For AdWords, Bing and Facebook, you will need a:

• Headline
• Description and call to action
• Link to your landing page

If you can get your main keyword into all three of those areas, you stand a good chance of getting a high relevance score.

How to Create Your Paid Ads – The Specs

For your Facebook ad, you also need a high-quality image. Upload a custom one yourself and put a keyword in the name of the file.

Also think about using words your target audience would. And don’t forget your call to action. You can’t use “Click here” wording, so be clear about the benefits if they do click.

For Facebook, your important specifications are:

• Image size: 1,200 x 628 pixels
• Ad Copy
• Text: 90 characters
• Headline: 25 characters
• Link: 30 characters

If you want your ad to get the most distribution and exposure, Facebook recommends using images that contain minimal (or no) overlaid text. This means if you wanted to market a book and use the book cover, your ad might get rejected. Giving it an interesting background, however, so the text makes up less than 25% of the overall image, might be enough to get your ad passed, or given special dispensation by those who check the ads at the site to ensure they are abiding by the guidelines.

Here is a useful summary if you want to learn more:

For AdWords, here are the specs:

• Dimensions for Text Ads in AdWords:
• Field Max length
• Headline 1 30 characters
• Headline 2 30 characters
• Description 80 characters
• Headline: 25 characters

In AdWords, there are also ad extensions:

• Sitelinks to your top products, for example
• Call on the phone
• Callout, an area underneath the description that highlights
• Location, to target people in your area, not the entire Internet
• Structured snippet, additional data about the product you are trying to sell
• Review of the product you are trying to sell.

These do take time to create but can increase click-through-rates.

Learn more about extensions here.

Specifications for non-animated image ads

• File Formats GIF, JPG, PNG
• size 150KB

Ad sizes

Square and rectangle

• 200 × 200 Small square
• 240 × 400 Vertical rectangle
• 250 × 250 Square
• 250 × 360 Triple widescreen
• 300 × 250 Inline rectangle
• 336 × 280 Large rectangle
• 580 × 400 Netboard

Skyscraper

• 120 × 600 Skyscraper
• 160 × 600 Wide skyscraper
• 300 × 600 Half-page ad
• 300 × 1050 Portrait

Leaderboard

• 468 × 60 Banner
• 728 × 90 Leaderboard
• 930 × 180 Top banner
• 970 × 90 Large leaderboard
• 970 × 250 Billboard
• 980 × 120 Panorama

Mobile

• 300 × 50 Mobile banner
• 320 × 50 Mobile banner
• 320 × 100 Large mobile banner

Specifications for animated image ads

• File type .GIF
• File size 150 KB or smaller

Image sizes

• Square and rectangle
• 200 × 200 Small square
• 240 × 400 Vertical rectangle
• 250 × 250 Square
• 250 × 360 Triple widescreen
• 300 × 250 Inline rectangle
• 336 × 280 Large rectangle
• 580 × 400 Netboard

Skyscraper

• 120 × 600 Skyscraper
• 160 × 600 Wide skyscraper
• 300 × 600 Half-page ad
• 300 × 1050 Portrait

Leaderboard

• 468 × 60 Banner
• 728 × 90 Leaderboard
• 930 × 180 Top banner
• 970 × 90 Large leaderboard
• 970 × 250 Billboard
• 980 × 120 Panorama

Mobile

• 300 × 50 Mobile banner
• 320 × 50 Mobile banner
• 320 × 100 Large mobile banner

How to Create Your Paid Ads – Animation length and speed          

Animation length must be 30 seconds or shorter and slower than 5 Frames Per Second (FPS). They can be looped but must stop after 30 seconds. You can learn more about image ads here.

Again, you might not have a large budget for AdWords, but if you are already making banners for your site and products, it might be worth converting your best one into an ad and then track your results. Once you understand how to create your paid ads the sky will no longer be the limit to what you can accomplish in your online business.

I’m author and online marketing strategist Connie Ragen Green. I work with entrepreneurs to create multiple streams of online income and would love to connect with you. Download my Online Entrepreneur’s Blueprint and get started right away.