Make room for the useful word

Imagine a half-built bookcase and a screw that has rolled somewhere it intends to remain. The useful news is small enough to hold between two fingers: you may be able to order another.

IKEA’s US spare-parts service offers small items such as screws, knobs and hinges at no cost through its online tool. Bigger furniture parts have a separate route; appliance parts have another. The small-parts tool asks for the part’s identification number. That is our raw material: an actual service, with a boundary. IKEA’s spare-parts page, ordering instructions.

We’re going to write a search-ad headline for it. These are practice lines I’ve made up, not IKEA advertisements or tested recommendations. We have Google’s 30-character headline allowance. Spaces and punctuation spend the allowance too.

Here is a perfectly serviceable way to waste most of it:

Quality Parts for Your Home

27 characters.

It fits. It sounds like advertising. It could belong to so many companies that I would struggle to remember which one had said it.

Before reading further, write a replacement. Keep it at 27 characters or fewer. Give the person beside that bookcase one useful fact they didn’t have before. A scrap of paper or an empty note will do.

Leave your line there for a moment.

Give the space to something

Mine is:

Free Small IKEA Spare Parts

27 characters.

The character count hasn’t moved. Almost everything else has.

“Quality” asks the reader to accept an assessment. “Free” gives them a price. “Your Home” gestures warmly at a vast category; “IKEA” locates the service. “Spare” tells us why these parts might be wanted. “Small” keeps the promise from expanding to every piece of the bookcase.

This isn’t a rule against adjectives. Small is an adjective, and it is doing work that quality wasn’t. Nor is free a magic word. A free thing you cannot use is a very short disappointment.

Say the two lines aloud. The first moves smoothly toward home, an inviting place to land. The second has more hard edges: free, small, spare, parts. It sounds closer to a label on a drawer. I prefer that slight plainness here. Someone looking for a fitting can open the right drawer.

Your version may have started with “Order.” That makes a different, defensible choice:

Order Small IKEA Spare Parts

28 characters.

It gives the reader an action, at the cost of the price. It also exceeds our first exercise’s limit by one, although it fits the actual headline field. I’d keep it on the page. A useful alternative should survive a workshop even when it doesn’t win the exercise.

The word that is taking up too much room

Now try this:

Free IKEA Replacement Parts

27 characters.

“Replacement” feels helpful. It describes the job the new part will do, and it is a word a person might naturally use when something has gone missing. It also occupies eleven characters. “Spare” takes five.

Before choosing between them, make a version that keeps replacement, IKEA, and the limit of 30. Preserve the small-parts boundary. You may have to give up something you wanted.

Write it before looking at mine.

Small IKEA Replacement Parts

28 characters.

The price has gone. We have bought a longer noun phrase by spending a benefit.

I don’t think the exchange is worthwhile for this particular line. “Spare parts” already names the service clearly enough for my ear; “replacement” adds less than “free.” But that is a judgment about these words in this situation. If readers consistently misunderstood “spare” as an optional extra rather than something to replace a missing piece, I would have a reason to reconsider.

What I won’t keep is the previous version that quietly dropped “small.” It may make someone with a broken shelf, door or appliance expect the same offer. There is no grammatical alarm when that happens. The sentence gets simpler, and the promise gets bigger.

Of course, a headline cannot contain a whole ordering process. The reader still needs to identify the right part and find it available. The destination must make that possible. But the existence of a destination is a poor excuse for making the invitation broader than the service.

This is where cutting copy becomes interesting. The stubborn word may be the one protecting the sentence.

Listen to where it lands

Keep all the words of our first revision. Move them. You may add punctuation, but stay within 30 characters.

Try to make the line feel less like a bundle of labels. Read your version once as a helpful person and once as a sign in a shop window.

Then compare.

Small IKEA Spare Parts: Free

28 characters.

The colon changes the delivery. First we establish what we are talking about. Then comes the pleasant fact. There’s a tiny pause before “free,” rather than an opening shout.

I like the sound of it. I’m less sure I would choose it. The original puts the distinctive fact first; this version asks the reader to reach the end. The colon also makes the line feel more like a price card. That can be charming in a workshop and awkward beside another headline.

A more concrete version is tempting:

IKEA Screws, Delivered Free

27 characters.

You can almost see the envelope. But now the line names only screws, leaving knobs and hinges outside its invitation. And “delivered free” can mean free postage on a paid item; it doesn’t clearly say the screw itself costs nothing. More vivid, less complete. I would consider it only for a narrower purpose, with the rest of the ad doing the missing work.

For the broad small-parts offer, I come back to:

Free Small IKEA Spare Parts

It isn’t the most graceful line on this page. It gives four useful pieces of information without making a little performance of itself. That is the choice I can explain.

Before using any of these in a real responsive search ad, I would read it beside the other assets. Google can combine headlines in different orders; a condition placed in another unpinned headline is not a dependable companion. Google’s guidance identifies specific pinned positions for language that must appear. A well-made line still has to belong to a well-made ad. Google’s pinning guidance.

And I have no result that says my choice will earn more clicks, more completed orders or more satisfied customers. Those questions need evidence from the ad and its audience. What we have done here is smaller and available to us now: made the offer easier to identify, kept its boundary, and listened to the words.

Return to the line you wrote at the beginning. Find the word you were proudest of. Give it a fair hearing. Then ask what you could put in its place.