PPC Ads: What's the best url format?

What you need, for adwords, is a domain that
is in sync with your keywords. It's the only
time I ever say you need a domain that
matches. Unless you are already a brand
name. Nothing else matters much.

Your domain can affect CTR in a big way.
If people don't know your url, and have
no idea what the url means, you may
not get a click. And you want clicks.

www is probably used, but used by people
who have a second level domain that matches,
or don't know about the domain and CTR
relationship.

One reason to buy an EMD or something, and
use it ONLY for PPC.

The way around this is with subdomains. The
rules about subdomains, is that you can use
any subdomain you wish, as long as the page
the click lands on is on the same domain.

Thus, and this may be a BIG tip for some of
you on adwords, do something like this:

If your domain is xyz.com, and your site is
on student loans, then create a subdomain
student-loans.xyz.com and put that as
your url. Then, perfectly ok by adwords
rules to have the landing page actually
be xyz.com.

Paul

In terms of capitalization, it used to be that capitalization of each word within the domain name was very helpful, but Google has taken to lower-casing the domain name. They still preserve capitalization after the / -- i.e. www.domain.com/TheyStillPreserveHere

I also believe that Google is adding www. to the front of all the visible URLs these days. If your URL is too long, then they must truncate it in some way, or maybe you just can't add those letters into the "display" URL.

The URL format should be more precise but informative.