Creating Ads that Buyers Want to Click
Apart from making sure that you have the right keywords and phrases so that your ads appear for relevant searches, you also want to make sure that your ads title and two line description are appealing enough to convince buyers to click, and clear enough that people who aren’t interested won’t click.
This really boils down to correct use of internet marketing techniques.
The single and simple way to make your ads convert better is to make sure that you sell the benefits of your products or service to potential customers – that is, what’s in it for them?
If your ads are as dull as dishwater, or if they don’t convey the reason why internet users should use you, then they won’t click on your ad – they’ll click one of your competitors ads that is more appealing to them.
The way to avoid this is to make sure that your title is straight to the point, highlighting the product or service right up front, and then to use the descriptive lines of text to sell the benefits, ideally with a “call to action” incorporated into the ad, like “buy now,” “get yours here,” etc.
Using our Red BrandX Shoes example a good ad might look like this:
Red BrandX Shoes
We have the latest red brandX shoes
in stock. Buy now for free shipping
The title in this example is straight to the point and is aimed directly at people looking for red brandx shoes.
Remember that if someone has searched using this term, then these keywords in the title and description will appear bold in the search results making them stand out.
The description tells searchers that you have the latest styles and fashions of the thing that they searched for, that they are in stock (i.e. you can get them quickly), and it then uses a call to action:
Buy now for free shipping.
The “buy now” is a call to action, the “free shipping” tells the person searching that you have an additional offer that is going to save them money, which will encourage them to click the ad.
The other thing that helps here is that people who are browsing with no intention to buy will be less inclined to click your ad if it mentions buying – they’ll be much more likely to click an alternative ad.
Clearly you will need to change the title and description to suit your own Unique Selling Points (USPs), which might be that you have the biggest selection, the lowest prices, next day delivery, instant delivery, or a host of other beneficial offers that you provide to your customers.
Other things that you might include in your title or description could be the price of the product – clearly this dissuades people who will find the price too high from clicking your ad – if they will have no intention of buying once they arrive at your site, you don’t want to pay for them to get there.
Avoid the trap of driving people to your site in the hope that they’ll buy, concentrate instead on driving people who are highly likely to buy – use your ads to filter them.
You also want to make sure that you set the individual URLs for each keyword in your Adwords panel.
If someone searches for “red brand x shoes” then they want to land on your specific page about red brand x shoes, don’t just have them land on your homepage and leave them to work out where to go for themselves.
Make everything as easy as possible for your visitors!
There is another trick that you can use for specific ad groups that you have set up around product groups or types called “Dynamic Keyword Insertion.”
This advanced Adwords technique allows you to insert a piece of code into your Ad group so that the title will contain whatever keywords the searcher used that triggered your ad.
This clearly makes your ads very specific to any searchers exact requirement, resulting in a higher click through rate.
For example, using the example from Google’s explanatory page here:
http://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=74996
In the ad group ‘Puppies,’ you create the following ad using two instances of the keyword insertion code:
Your ad group ‘Puppies’ contains the following three keywords: poodles, yorkies, west highland terriers Depending on which keyword a user searches on, your ad will show in one of the following ways:
Notice that the default text is used in the ad’s title when a user searches on ‘west highland terriers,’ since the keyword is too long to fit. However, ‘west highland terriers’ is inserted in the destination URL, since there’s no character limit there. |
One interesting thing to note here is that there is a slight error within Google that can work to your advantage.
Ordinarily you get only 25 characters to create your title with. Using the keyword code above can return results that have titles longer than 25 characters – so in the example given by Google the 3rd search term may well produce West Highland Terriers as the title.
Please be sure to refer to Google’s explanations of how you can use this coding at the URL given on the last page to better understand exactly how you can use this to improve your ads performance.
Whichever way you choose to present your ads it is imperative that you measure the results and try different approaches to see which works best.
Try using different titles with a call to action in the title if possible, different wording, and concentrating on different benefits.
Measure which of your variations provide the best results and then try different descriptions, again concentrating on different benefits, calls to action, etc.
Even if each change only improves your click through and conversion rates by small amounts, the effect when these are multiplied together can have very dramatic effects on your turnover and profitability.
We won’t dwell too much here on the different methods of tracking the effectiveness of your campaigns since there are very many different analytics packages available.
You could always use Google’s in built Adwords tracking methods along with perhaps Google Analytics for this purpose.
You can learn more about each by following the links:
Integrating Google Analytics with Adwords
In Summary:
Remember to make sure that your Ad Groups titles are right to the point and mention the product or service.
Remember to make your ads sell the benefits to potential customers – let them know what’s in it for them and what they can expect to find on your website.
Letting people know exactly what you’re offering and what they’re going to get out of it will increase your response rate from genuine prospects, while reducing the number of spurious clicks from people who are unlikely to buy.
