Bid Management Tools

Purpose of ad copy

The reason someone is searching on the internet is because they are looking for an answer to something. Good ads lay out a clear path so the user can find the answer to something.

Good ad copy should:

1. Promote our goals for success (lead generation)

2. Utilize our product uniqueness

3. Showcase products benefits to users

4. Display product features

5. Identify with the consumer

6. Tell the consumer what to do next

Ultimately good ad copy connects the search query to the landing page

Connecting the search query to the landing page with clear and informative ads which tells the user what to expect after the click and what to do after the click most often leads to success.

The call to action is what you want someone to do after the click.

Ads without calls to action are just messages to read. Ads with call to actions are directions that lead a searcher to not only click on your ad but also convert on your website. Using a call to action in ad copy and mentioning that on the landing page should increase conversion rates.

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Many argue that the call to action is most important to element of ad copy but you can’t have a good call to action and a bad headline.

Succinct headline:

While your ad copy is generally what draws the click-through to the site, your headline is often what draws attention to the ad in the first place.

The simplest way to draw attention is to include your keyword in the headline because those words are bolded when they match the search query. The best headlines, however, are the ones that are unique and interesting, whether or not you include the keyword. More interesting headlines lead to higher CTRs.

Unique selling proposition (USP):

What is unique about our business, why should they do business with us verse anybody else. How will the searcher realize that we’re the best solution for them? The USP is where we promote our uniqueness.

Features: bullet point list.

Benefits: why a product or service will make our customers life better.

Example: Zoomo drive

Feature: unlimited storage

Benefit: don’t carry around an extra hard drive

Accounting: Online

Accounting courses/classes (HL: Accounting Courses Anywhere)

Take courses online and train for a career in accounting.

Accounting certification/certified

Work towards your accounting certification with our degree.

Accounting schools/colleges

Looking for an Accounting School? Take our classes anytime, anywhere.

Accounting degree

Earn your degree online and start an accounting career.

Become an accountant/Accountant

Study Online to become an accountant. Download a Brochure.

CPA course/school

Work towards your CPA with a degree in accounting.

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Accounting: Online

Interest – Introduce benefits, such as or how will it make your life better, can help you gauge a consumer to which to learn more about your product.

1. become an accountant

2. accounting career

3. accountant

Learn – Do not focus features; continue showing them how your product will improve their life.

1. Accounting online

2. accounting school/college

3. accounting course/classes

4. accounting degree

5. accounting training

Shop (typically occurs offline via admissions department)

1. Herzing accounting

Buy

1. Herzing university

Last week we went through the left brain’s parameters and limitations of paid search ads. Frankly, you have to have a deep understanding of what’s allowed by the search engines in terms of copywriting to allow the creative juices to flow. Most people understand the character limits (25 character title, 35 character display URL, etc.), but there’s a lot more to successful search advertising than understanding the rules. Check out last week’s post just to make sure you’re really up to speed on specific editorial policies or even better, review the engine help guides on this topic.

Now that you understand the rules, let’s dive into how to write great text ad copy. When I was doing research for this piece, I came across Google’s six best practices for creating paid search ads. I think they’ve really hit the nail on the head here:

Create simple, enticing ads. What makes your product or service stand out from your competitors? Highlight these key differentiating points in your ad. Be sure to describe any unique features or promotions you offer.

Include prices and promotions. The more information about your product that a user can gain from your ad text, the better. For example, if a user sees the price of a product and still clicks the ad, you know they’re interested in a potential purchase at that price. If they don’t like the price, they won’t click your ad, and you save yourself the cost of that click.

Use a strong call-to-action. Your ad should convey a call-to-action along with the benefits of your product or service. A call-to-action encourages users to click on your ad and ensures they understand exactly what you expect them to do when they reach your landing page. Some call-to-action phrases are Buy, Purchase, Call today, Order, Browse, Sign up, and Get a quote; while ‘find’ and ’search’ may be accurate verbs, they imply that the user is still in the research mode, and may not encourage the user to perform the action you’d most like them to take.

Include one of your keywords in your ad text. Find the best performing keyword in your ad group and include it in your ad text, especially in the title. Whenever a user types that keyword and sees your ad, the keyword phrase will appear in bold font within your ad on Google. This helps draw the user’s attention to your ad and shows users that your ad relates to their search.

Choose the best destination URL. Review the website you’re advertising and find the specific page that has the information or product described in your ad. If users do not find what is promised as soon as they arrive, they are more likely to leave your website. Be sure that any promotions and particular products mentioned in your ad are visible on your landing page.

Test multiple ads in each ad group. Experiment with different offers and call-to-action phrases to see what’s most effective for your advertising goals. Our system automatically rotates ads within an ad group and shows the better-performing ad more often.

Here are some other pro tips and tricks:

Remember the intent! You should have a pretty good idea of where in the buying cycle searchers are using specific keywords. Are they at the top of the funnel or ready to buy at the bottom? Make sure your address user intent in your creative. If they’re just looking for information, your ad should reflect that—you’ll have a quite different ad for people ready to buy and simply browsing for the best deal.

Stand out from the crowd. If all of your competitors are touting price, try a different tactic such as listing the benefits from your product/service or some awards you may have won. Eyeballs are drawn to differences on the search result page, not similarities.

If you’re all about price, stay on top of your competitors. If your entire strategy revolves around an offer, such as a percentage off or a low cost deal, then you must monitor your keyword landscape closely. If your bid is at $20, someone might come in at $19.99 and make off with your customers.

Include local terms for your top markets. If you’re a local business, this is a no-brainer. Make sure someone who is nearby realizes that you are too. It immediately creates a trust factor if they know they can drive out to see you. For national (or international) advertisers, you can let potential customers know that you have a focus in their area and that you are addressing their specific needs. Make sure, however, to back this up on the landing page. Many large advertisers split up their campaigns by region, state or even DMA. That can mean a lot of unique landing pages, but the increased conversion rate due to the relevancy factory may justify the cost.

“Official site” is golden. If you are indeed the official site for your product or service, using the words official site works really well. I haven’t seen any research for it, but I’ve used this tactic time and again for clients, and it’s never let me down.

“Free shipping” also is a crowd pleaser. This is something you definitely need to test, but it seems to work really well as a general marketing technique, especially on the internet where shipping costs sometimes negate the benefit of ordering direct. But don’t go this route unless you have done the math that free shipping won’t be too costly for you either.

Use www. in your display url. This comes from AdGooroo’s best practice list for ad copy. According to their research, they found that:

“…including “www” in the display URL tends to boost clickthrough rates. 80.6% of the ads in our database also included it, leading us to believe that this is a general rule. If you are among the nearly 20% of advertisers who are not including “www” in your URL, you should consider testing it.”

Use language that turns away the “wrong” users. Not every paid search click is a valuable one. Make sure to spot trends and tailor your ad copy accordingly. For example, if you sell car parts in bulk, and find that your ads are attracting users who just want to buy one or two individual parts, you may want to indicate that you only sell in large quantities. Remember, you pay per click, so getting the wrong users to not click your ads is as important as getting the right ones to do so.

Next week, we’ll go through Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI) and how you can utilize some automation in your ad copy. We’ll also examine a strategy of building specific concepts for your ads which can help you pinpoint the right direction that works with your target audience.

source: http://searchengineland.com/the-right-brain-of-paid-search-ads-tips-tricks-for-creative-ad-copywriting-44296

These are some of my most used and most successful text ad phrases! You want to be sure to include more detailed information about the product you’re trying to sell, but these general phrases should help you fill in the blanks.

Let’s get to it!

Include Pricing
Only $9.95!
45% Off

Obvious Call to Action
Buy Now!
Order Online!
Click For More Options

Loyal Americans
Ships from Milwaukee
Made in USA

Cheap and Fast Gratification
Free Shipping!
Ships Today!
In Stock

Give Them Options
8 Colors Available
Customize Online
4 New Styles!

There you have it; couldn’t be more to the point. Now go write some new ads and make sure you’re experimenting with at least 2 ad variations at a time. I have a few more tricks up my sleeve, but I’ll hold onto them for now (search people are so private). These are just some basics that you can try out. If you have any questions – feel free to ask!

source: http://jordonmeyer.com/my-5-favorite-ppc-copywriting-tips/

Over the past two months in this column, I’ve discussed some of the pitfalls of A/B ad testing, and in this third and final installment, I’ll discuss a new PPC ad optimization model I’ve been working on and have lovingly entitled, the Van Wagner Ad Sets Optimization Model.

The model is completely new and thoroughly untested, but from early feedback from readers and colleagues, there seems to be strong anecdotal support that this model can become an important asset in any PPC campaign manager’s toolkit. I’ll be presenting my Ad Sets Optimization Model more formally at SMX Advanced in Seattle next month, but will give you a general overview here today.

Before jumping into the Ad Sets Optimization Model, there’s some unfinished business from previous two columns, Pitfalls of A/B Split Testing, Part 1, and Part 2. Last month, I offered the incentive of a chance at a lobster dinner to readers who provided feedback and critique on this ad testing discussion. My grateful thanks to all who chimed in, and congratulations the SearchEngineLand reader whose handle is MMantlo. Please email me and I will arrange to have that lobster dinner delivered to your door, courtesy of Lobster.com.

Ad Sets optimization model

The Van Wagner Ad Sets Optimization Model is based on the premise that an ad group containing a set of well-performing ads can outperform an ad group that contains only the single best ad in that ad group.

Some readers and colleagues have confirmed that after completing rounds of A/B testing and settling on one champion ad, they’ve seen unexplained declines in ad group CTR, clicks, and conversions, even after addressing the most common cause of this phenomenon, keyword match types bringing in unfocused search traffic.

How can a set of ads in an ad group outperform the best ad in that ad group?

Or, as one colleague posed the question, “If none of the ads in the set outperforms the champion individually, how can the entire set? This strikes us as analogous to claiming that ten fast men together can be faster than the fastest man in the world.”

Yes, the idea is counterintuitive, but only if you are narrowly focus on the problem of finding the best performing ad, rather than optimizing your ad group. Instead of the fastest runner analogy, a better analogy may be the Tour de France bike race, where a peleton of ten good riders working together can always beat the fastest single rider.

So how can sub-optimal ads work together with the best ad to increase the yield of the ad group they belong to? The simple answer is that they enable the ad group to connect with a wider range of audience needs and desires than a single ad.

To demonstrate how this works, let’s take an example of an ad group with a single exact match keyword, “blue widgets,” and two finalist ads from our A/B testing.

Here are the ad headlines and performance metrics. Note that while I am mentioning clicks and click-through rates here, the analysis works the same way using conversions and conversion rates.

ad A: [Save 20% on Blue Widgets] 350 Clicks / 5000 Impressions = 7.0% CTR
ad B: [ECO Friendly Blue Widgets] 450 Clicks / 4000 Impressions = 11.3% CTR

The sampling is significant according to Verster and they say it’s pretty much a slam dunk—you can be 99% confident that ad B will continue to beat ad A.

But wait, before you declare a winner, think about the audience population your ads are tailored to. In this case, the two ads touch on very different consumer desires. Ad A is designed to appeal to bargain hunters, and ad B is meant to appeal to people interested in green lifestyles. These may be almost mutually exclusive audiences. To cheapskates, eco-friendly generally doesn’t mean cheap, and vice-versa for eco-consumers.

If these ads appeal to non-overlapping audience segments, what happens when you take ad A offline? You lose the entire audience for ad A, which in this case represents more than half of your target audience. That would be a very bad decision!

Instead of making that decision to bisect the audience, you should instead consider running the two ads as a set, and campaigns set to even ad rotation. The basic tenet of the Ad Sets Optimization model is that when more of your good ads are seen by more of your target audience, your ad group yield will improve, even if some ads are better than others.

The Ad Sets Optimization Model relies on two things. First, people search on a given search term more than once, anywhere from 2 to 20 times, on their way to a decision. Second, search engines will rotate ads in a way that earns them most revenue.

With two ads in your ad set and campaigns set to even rotation, you can use a coin-toss probability to describe the likelihood that a user will see both of your ads.

• On 1 search, there’s a 50% chance they will see both ads.
• With 2 searches, the probability rises to 75%.
• After 3 searches, the probability becomes 87.5%.
• After 4 searches, the probability reaches 93.75%.

As this simple probability table suggests, your ads are very likely to be seen by your two target audiences even after just a few searches, giving you a very good shot at getting the click and the conversion.

On the other hand, if you blindly follow A/B ad split testing to its logical conclusion and take ad A offline, you have a 0% chance of getting a click from your cost-conscious audience.

We don’t know exactly how the engines rotate ads, but I think it is reasonable to assume that a new searcher will probably see ad B first, because it has the higher CTR. The engine may even present the same ad on that user’s second query even if they did not click on it the first time. However, after showing a user ad B twice in a row without getting a click, I’d imagine the search engine would be much more inclined to show ad A to see if that will attract a click from this searcher. If that is indeed how it works, then the coin-flip probabilities shown above tilt even more towards both ads being seen during their search session.

The Van Wagner Ad Sets Optimization Model can be used in conjunction with existing A/B ad testing procedures to produce higher performing ad groups. To learn more about it, come to the Test That Ad! session at SMX Advanced in Seattle on Tuesday, June 8th.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Source: http://searchengineland.com/pitfalls-of-ab-ad-testing-part-3-41190