Display and social ad copy

What display and social ad copy is

Display and social ad copy is the handful of words on an advert that appears while somebody is doing something else: a banner beside an article, a sponsored post in a Facebook feed, a promoted item on LinkedIn. It is usually a headline, one body line and a button label, and the image does at least half the work.

It is interruption, not answer. That is the whole difference from search ad copy, where the reader typed a phrase and is actively looking for a supplier. Here nobody asked. The reader owes you nothing, and the first job of the words is to earn the second and a half it takes to read them.

It is not design, and it is not media buying. I write the words and specify what the image must show; I do not build the creative or spend the budget.

Who this is for

A business with something genuinely new to say to people who have not heard of it: an opening, a product, an event, a service in a town you have just started covering. This is how you reach a person who does not know there is anything to search for.

The second case is retargeting, where the audience already visited your site. That is a much easier job than cold reach, because the reader half-recognises you and the copy can refer to what they were looking at.

You do not need this if people already search for what you sell and the budget is small. Money spent on paid search reaches somebody with their wallet half out. Cold display reaches somebody reading the news. If you can afford only one, do the one where the reader is already asking.

What I write

Before any of it, the honest part. Most display and social advertising fails because the offer is wrong, not because the words are wrong. A well-written ad for a thing nobody particularly wants produces a cheap click and no customer, and the temptation is then to rewrite the ad again. I will say so on the first call if that is what I think is happening, and the fix is stating a better offer rather than buying more impressions. The related failure is asking too much too early: a stranger in a feed will give you a download or a question answered, and rarely a booking on first sight, so I write to the small ask unless you tell me otherwise.

• The headline. One idea. Not the service, the product range and the guarantee at once. If two ideas both matter, that is two ads.
• The body line. One sentence that makes the headline believable: what it is, who it is for, or the single piece of proof that fits.
• The button. Four words saying what happens next, matched to what the page actually does when they arrive.
• The image note. What the picture or the first frame has to show, written for whoever makes it. Most feed ads are seen before they are read, so this is not an afterthought.
• The audience note. Who each set is for and what they were doing when it appeared, so nobody later merges four audiences into one.

What you get

The ad sets. One spreadsheet, grouped by audience, with three to five variants for each. Every variant has headline, body line, button and image note, written inside the character limits of the platform it is going to, because Meta and LinkedIn cut at different lengths and a truncated headline is a wasted impression.

The page note. One page saying what the landing page has to say for the ad to make sense on arrival. If the page is not built for one action, I will say it needs a proper landing page and quote that separately.

A test plan. Which variants run against which, how long before you judge them, and the point at which the answer is that the offer needs changing rather than the words.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A small bookkeeping practice in Halifax wants work from restaurant owners. It has been running one sponsored post that says "Professional bookkeeping services for your business. Contact us for a free quote." It has run for five months and produced two enquiries, both from people wanting a job.

The rewrite drops the word bookkeeping from the headline and starts from what a restaurant owner actually dreads, which is the remittance deadline arriving while they are short-staffed. Three sets are written: one for cold reach with a headline about the deadline, one for retargeting readers of the practice's article on tip reporting, and one for people who started the contact form and stopped. The ask changes from "free quote" to a one-page calendar of the year's filing dates, given away. The image note says: not a stock handshake, a photograph of the owner in an actual kitchen. The test plan says that if the calendar does not get taken up within three weeks, the problem is the offer and the budget should stop.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you are advertising, who you want to reach, what you have run before and what it produced. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Number of audiences, variants each, and platforms, agreed before anything starts.
3. Inputs. Read-only access to the ad account if there is one, a description of the audience, and the page the ads point at. Two working days.
4. The draft sets. Delivered four to six working days after the call, with the image notes and the page note.
5. Final copy. One round of revisions included, then the test plan and a short handover call.

What it costs

Display and social ad copy is quoted as a fixed price in CAD after the half-hour call, because the work scales with the number of audiences and platforms rather than the number of words. Ad spend is never included. The pricing page shows the four ways of working, and the price is fixed in writing before anything starts.

What happens next

Most businesses come back for the page rather than the ad, because the clicks arrive and the page was built for browsers rather than for one action; that is a page with one job on it. If the ads are part of something larger with a start and an end date, the same idea carried into email and print is campaign copy. And if the test plan says the audience was never right, the honest next step is finding out who is actually buying before spending again. This piece of work is complete on its own, and nothing further is assumed.