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When you only have 95 characters of text to convince a user to click on your AdWords ad, you may be looking for new ways to make your ad stand out from the rest. The visible URL gives you an additional 35 characters to do this. So what's the best type of URL to use?

A recent study by Memorable Domains found that "ads featuring a generic domain name with an exact match to the product (ElectricBicycles.co.uk) performed significantly better than identical ads featuring an alternative generic (YourBikes.co.uk) or non-generic (InAHurry.co.uk) domain."

The CTR of ads using the ElectricBicycles.co.uk domain name was 15% and 42% higher than the two alternatives.

The ElectricBicycles.co.uk ads produced 45% more clicks than the YourBikes.co.uk ads and 105% more clicks than the InAHurry.co.uk ads.

We conclude that the strong performance of a generic domain name is driven by factors such as:

• the close match between the domain name and the product searched for (irrespective of the search keywords used)
• automatic bolding of search terms in the domain
• the potential positive impact of the domain name on ad quality score

Unless you have a very strong brand, it probably is better to use the limited space in the ad to draw people's attention to its relevance. Once they're on your site, you can tell them about all the great benefits your brand offers.