What Makes an Ad Attractive and Have High Conversions?

Last Updated on 3 years by Christopher Jan Benitez

There are thousands of brands competing with each other and all of them want to pull the attention of their target audience and get them to convert.

If you’re reading this then you’re probably one of the advertisers looking to get a piece of that cake.

With that said, how are you going to cut the line and be in front of your target audience?

There’s another thing though. While we all want eye-catching ads, ultimately, it’s the conversions that matter.

Creating ads is relatively easy, but an ad that converts is another discussion.

There are many variables that make an ad a high converting one while keeping the costs at a minimum.

Imagine selling a $500 product for an overall ad spend of $20. You can even go lower if you know how to make your ad attractive and put it out in front of the right people. 

That’s always the dream. You want your ad to work for you.

So how do you do that?

In this post, we’ll talk about the key elements of what makes an ad attractive and have high conversions.

Targets the ideal buyer

Do you know who your real audience is? The easiest way to identify your target market is by going through your website’s Google Analytics (GA).

GA will show you a sense of the demographic idea of who your audience is and what pages and products they frequent.

You can gauge from this data the type of advertisement you should run that will work with the current audience that you have.

However, if you don’t have this data yet, then what you can do is target a broad audience.

While it may seem that a small target audience is the way to go, a broad audience can give you wider data that you can narrow down until you hit the right spot.

This strategy will entirely depend on how much you are willing to spend. A broad audience may be a bit expensive, but this will let you look at all sides and learn that the audience that you aren’t even thinking of targeting are the ones who are the highest converters.

If you have a limited advertising budget, you can always target a smaller audience and optimize along the way.

Has a clear goal

Identifying your goal and value proposition at the very beginning gives you an idea if the rest of the elements of your ad are really relevant to what you’re trying to happen.

For example, if your goal is to get them to buy your custom t-shirt design, then the messaging of your ad should focus on getting the viewers to buy.

You may add the pricing, the shipping details, the payment methods available, and a call-to-action telling them what to do next. Either to buy it now or to claim a coupon.

In addition, there should be no confusion on the audience’s side. Make sure to have a clear and concise message that is easy for the reader to understand.

Optimized ad format per channel

There are various channels to advertise depending on what your goal is.

Search Ads, Social Media, YouTube, and Email are among the most used channels for advertising but they also have some best practices that you need to follow.

For instance, search ads should have short and concise texts and focus on the search terms of your audience while Instagram is mostly about images and short videos.

Not only that. Your ads should be optimized to fit not only the formatting rules but also the audience that you’re targeting.

If you have an online store, you can try Facebook Ads or Google Ads. And if your business is mostly for professionals, you can advertise on LinkedIn instead.

Grabs attention

As always, the more eyes to your ads the better!

Your audience’s attention is constantly pulled in different directions, so you’ll have to stand out and catch their attention in a snap.

How do you do that? Here are the three important elements of attention-grabbing ads.

A stellar headline and ad copy

Use catchy headlines that are interesting that make people want to read your ad.

A little creativity goes a long way! If you’re struggling to come up with new ideas, there’s always a tool to help you.

Anyword is an online advertising tool and its main purpose is to generate copies to help advertisers with landing pages, emails, product pages, and editorials to help with your ad campaign.

Pros

  • Creates usable, one-click, AI-generated copy for your campaigns.
  • Polished UX makes creating AI copy a cinch!
  • Affordable pricing with generous word limit

Cons

  • Limited industry options

Anyword is an AI-powered copywriting platform that helps marketers tailor their messages to their ideal audience. It generates and evaluates copy for ads, social posts, email subject lines, landing page copy, and much more.

Let’s try generating headlines using Anyword, an AI copywriting tool specifically for this purpose!

Here’s a sample:

Anyword can generate headlines for you on various channels. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Ads headline are among the list and there are a few more for different purposes.

What’s best is that they provide demographic data of the users who are more likely to engage with the ad copy.

This way, you’ll have an idea if your ad copy has a chance of converting to eliminate the guessing game. 

In the “Improve with AI” option, you can see the demographic data as you type the ad copy that you want to improve. You can also set the age and gender groups that you want to target.

All you have to do next is click ‘generate more’ and you’ll have a list of copies that you can use!

Aside from headlines, they also help you generate compelling descriptions or ad texts that go along with your ad.

This helps you be more efficient as the research time will be reduced and you don’t have to scratch your head trying to come up with new ideas each time.

Eye-catching visuals

Great copies go hand in hand with striking visuals, so invest in images and videos too!

There’s a psychology behind advertising–consumer psychologists exist for a reason.

Here are some factors that influence the viewer’s buying decision.

  • Product and branding colors
  • Location imagery
  • Appeals to emotions
  • Famous personalities/influencers
  • Storytelling power
  • Fear of missing out (FOMO)
  • Background color

Ultimately, your ad should focus on getting your viewers to convert. The way to do that is to understand that your target consumers all have different motivations. Your job is to identify that to your benefit.

Click worthy call-to-action

A well-crafted calls-to-action or CTA will help increase conversions and generate more revenue.

Copywriters work hand in hand with marketers who know how and when to use the most effective CTA buttons and techniques in their online ad campaign.

CTA is an action verb so it’s meant to persuade your viewers on what to do next. 

If you’re telling them to contact you then you can say “Talk to Us”. If you want them to buy a product, you can either tell them to “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart”.

Your CTAs should be relevant to what you’re offering while keeping your branding in mind.

To know if your CTAs and the rest of your ads are effective, the next step is to evaluate and test them all.

Evaluated and tested

There are so many ways to advertise a website, but the only way to know which one would work best is to test and analyze them.

Advertising is of course not a one-time thing. If you want to be successful in this field, then you’ll have to be prepared to constantly test and understand the key metrics that matter.

Get a closer look at the performance of your ads. You might be wasting a huge amount of money on bad ads.

Changes that may look small have a likelihood to be the one thing you might be missing so be sure to do A/B testing.

For example, changing your call to action to “Book Now” instead of “Learn More” may surprise you with the results. Ad schedule may also be a factor.

Simple changes like that have the potential to have a huge impact on your cost per conversion. This will also help you collect more information on what kind of ad will work on your next product or audience.

So, test out different variations of your ads by changing things like colors, fonts, or headlines. Keep an eye on what works best with each audience you’re targeting so you can maximize each dollar you are spending.

Put it all together!

After putting these practices together, it’s mostly going to be waiting and optimizing game.

When you find out which ad works best for you, all you have to do is to try to replicate it to your other products or make an even better version.

A mere $100 ad budget can triple your revenue if you know how to optimize your ads to work for you.

You have to remember that your target audience is exposed and bombarded with ads every single day. So, making sure that your ads are optimized and have the highest quality score at the very beginning will set you up for a fast take off.