Using ChatGPT To Write Google Ad Copy

Over the last couple of months, we’ve seen people utilizing ChatGPT for all types of marketing functions – keyword research, SEO, copywriting… etc.

I asked ChatGPT to write ad copy, advertising Position², with headlines of 30 characters (or less) and descriptions of 90 characters (or less).

Here’s what I got back:

Now, there are a few immediate problems that are quick to spot:

• Character limits aren’t always followed (I specifically asked ChatGPT not to use our Brand in the headlines because I couldn’t get any ads under 30 characters). Because I believe that our Brand would be mandatory in the first headline, I would have to create that Headline 1 (H1) manually and pin it, leaving the ChatGPT input for Headlines 2 & 3 (H2 and H3).
• A few awkward constructs exist (e.g. Position² Agency) that need to be fixed.
• The range of descriptors is narrow (digital, business, marketing, strategies, success, growth, results, expertise etc.)

Overall, these ads don’t suck. They’re better than many copy writers I’ve worked with. Even more important, I can bring all this ad text up to an acceptable standard in less than 10 minutes.

Of the 20 ad headlines, forgetting about the character limit issue that needs to be addressed, the only headline that seems awkward is “Expertly Drive Online Success”…and this is easily fixed by removing “Expertly”.

While many of the ad description lines are average (as currently constructed), all of them are workable with some simple and quick editing. For example, I modified the example below:

From ChatGPT: Expert digital marketing from Position² Agency for your business

After my edit: Position²: Digital Marketing Expertise For Your Business

What ChatGPT does very well here is staying within its “lanes” of knowledge. It’s clear that it only knows Position² at a very superficial level, but it doesn’t stray from its limited knowledge of us. The challenge of ad copy is to present the same type of information in enough different ways to populate the maximum number of allowable ad copy variants for Responsive Search Ads (15 headlines, 4 description lines).

Google Ads offers ad copy suggestions when setting up certain campaigns that are generally on point and usable. What Google doesn’t currently do is take their ad copy suggestions and roll out multiple variants of them which should be easy to do given the ease with which ChatGPT can. I suspect that Google will move in this direction by allowing “external factors” to be brought into its ad copy creation algorithm.

When I write ad copy for clients, my first step is to scan the relevant pages for content that is easily adaptable to the Google Ads medium. I will sometimes copy and paste the content from the website and sometimes, but I’ll have to tweak it a bit. I’ll then take what I’ve culled from the website and manually create multiple textual variants.

These secondary “ad riffs” are what ChatGPT does really well. Their entire ad output shown here are just variations on a singular theme and we would want our Paid Search Ads to aggressively hit on that theme.

With a little bit of human oversight, ChatGPT can contribute to any ad copy creation scenario, though it’s a long way from being a singular solution.