CTR. The Advertiser s Guide to Writing Profitable Pay-Per Click. A BoostCTR White Paper

Transcription

1 The Advertiser s Guide to Writing Profitable Pay-Per Click A BoostCTR White Paper

2 The Advertiser s Guide to Writing Profitable Pay-Per Click Pay-per click marketing offers advertisers a unique means of reaching potential customers. Paying per click means that advertising is purchased based on real activity, and the click portion of the title implies that that activity is happening online and is imminently trackable. But the availability of data means that successful pay-per click advertising requires a combination of effective metrics-driven analysis and compelling ad creative generation. Often pay-per click campaign managers possess one or the other of these skills, and as understanding various platforms and bidding strategies become increasingly prized expertise, the ability to create great ad copy often gets neglected. In the coming pages, we ll outline proven techniques and best practices for compelling prospects to click and convert with your ad copy, as well as providing specific examples so that you can see how theory can be applied to real-life ad buys and actual ad creative. You ll learn: How to tailor ad copy to specific traffic sources How to get more out of different pay-per click platforms like AdWords, Facebook ads, and more How to align ad copy with landing pages to maximize not only clicks, but also conversions The impact the click-through rate (CTR) on your ads has on your overall pay-per click costs Detailed best practices around headlines, descriptions, URLs, and image ads How to test and optimize your ad text after you ve launched a campaign And more - and throughout we ll be layering on specific examples and hypothetical situations with example ad copy to help you understand how you can actually apply the best practices to your business. We ll start at what should really be the beginning of writing great ad copy: understanding your audience. Who Sees These Ads, Anyway? It s crucial to understand the ad inventory you re buying and the way different platforms match your ads to their users. In thinking through these matching algorithms you want to consider two key characteristics about your prospects: Intent - What is the level of intent of the prospect you re putting your ad in front of? Are they a Google user searching for something specific, a Facebook user likely logged on to catch up with friends and family, or visiting their favorite news site or blog to stay up to date with the latest news and trends? These three different prospects have dramatically different levels of intent and subsequently need to be treated very differently.

3 Persona - Contextual advertising is becoming increasingly efficient and now represents a powerful medium for getting a specific message in front of a specific demographic. Social networking platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn offer incredible targeting possibilities like being able to show ads to users with specific interests, who work in certain industries, and even those who are employed at specific companies. Once you understand your audience you can better address their specific pain points and you can understand how to create a message that resonates with them. This guide is focused on creating compelling ad copy and not designed to teach you about the nuts and bolts of effectively using pay-per click platforms like AdWords and Facebook, but we have included some helpful resources on that subject in an addendum that you can find at the very end of the paper. At a strategic level it s important to think about how users are driven to your ad copy and the controls you used to target those searchers. Search Marketing, Keywords, & Search Queries A search is effectively a question or an expression of demand. Your ad text affords you an opportunity to come up with the right answer. It s important in answering these questions to understand the difference between keywords and search queries because often times you re not answering the question you think you are. You can learn more about the distinction between keywords and search queries here but the general idea is that you need to understand what s rolled up into your keywords:

4 Notice the disconnect between the top bidded keywords in this account on the left and the top search queries actually driving traffic on the right. Besides the obvious benefit of eliminating waste and identifying top performing queries in a campaign, reviewing search queries within a paid search marketing account can provide powerful suggestions for ad copy optimization. Let s walk through a specific example. Keywords that are run on broad match can be matched against search terms that have an entirely different layer of intent, as we see above with a list of bar equipment keywords being matched to used weights. But a more subtle and equally instructive example of how knowledge of a search query can help to write better ad text than the mere knowledge of a keyword can be seen in the relationship between a phrase or modified broad match keyword and a more specific search query. For our example, we ll look at the mini cooler term on phrase match in an AdWords account: While mini cooler is our core term, we re also matching against terms like coca cola mini cooler and monster mini cooler. Short of breaking these terms out and creating a more specific group for them, this is very valuable information in crafting our ad text as we can now replace a generic ad like side one: With something that better speaks to the terms we saw in our search query report like this: And we could even test an ad that uses the more specific terms verbatim in the ad: This third variation may be discriminating to people searched for mini coolers, but there s also a strong possibility that it does the best job of answering the entire basket of search queries out of all of the options. The only way to truly know for sure is to test! (We ll go into greater depth about creating and executing ad copy testing later in the guide).

5 Building A Persona (And Messaging To It!) Personas are a tool that marketers can use in all sorts of different mediums, such as designing site architecture and even segmenting search marketing keyword lists, but they are a particularly powerful method of executing demographic targeting campaigns on platforms like Facebook:

6 There are some powerful options here, and you can see how we could possibly write some very compelling ad creative for the Facebook user who: Lives in areas we can cost efficiently ship to Is a male between the ages of Likes beer and wine Has an affiliation with our fan page Are single Are currently in college (or even are at a specific college) Having built this persona we can now test creative that speaks specifically to these people. We can even get more granular with these segmentations and show Harvard College students different branded inventory than we display to Georgia State students and alumni. And the messaging we use in the ad s body copy can speak specifically to these personas. Understanding the targeting within our campaign is obviously crucial to creating great ad text for these personas. The Power of Placement Which Sites Are Showing Your Contextual Ads? The third major swath of advertising inventory is placement targeting, or contextual ads that are placed on specific Websites. The most common platform advertisers will leverage to tap into this type of inventory is Google s AdSense via the AdWords interface. This type of inventory is interesting because it neither allows you to target specific personas/people or answer a specific question, but rather allows you to get display placement on specific Websites. Google s content network affords advertisers a few different controls here: Keywords It s important to understand the difference between search keywords and keywords on the display network. While search keywords serve to create the highly specific question and answer experience we mentioned above, keywords on the display network create a theme and allow you to identify the types of keywords that are representative of the pages you want your ad to appear on. Managed Placements You can also select specific sites that Google has in their network and run your ads there.

7 It s important to understand the sites your ad copy will be running on, whether that copy is an image ad, text, or a combination of the two. By better understanding where your ads are running you re able to: Create ad copy that will effectively interrupt the type of person browsing the sites your ad is placed on. Either blend with or stand out from a specific page s content. Understand who you need to be filtering out with your ad copy (not everyone will be interested in your offer, and with pay-per click understanding who you don t want coming to your site is as important as understanding who you do want coming to your site we ll revisit the concept of qualifying traffic later in the guide). Once you have a firm understanding of how your ads may be matching against these core drivers of pay-per click traffic, you next need to make sure that the messaging in your ad copy is properly aligned with your landing page. Keeping Promises Making Sure Clicks Turn into Conversions Just as search queries are questions and ad copy can provide an answer to those questions, your ad represents a promise to your prospects, which your landing page needs to fulfill. The Demand Fulfillment process Search Queries, Placements & Personas A question is asked or demand is revealed Ad Copy An answer is given that Makes a Promise Landing Page The promise is fulfilled (or not!)

8 As you create ad copy, you need to keep in mind not only who is reading the copy, but also what you can actually sell them and how you ll position that offer on your landing page. Let s take a look at the search query landing page optimization for some interesting examples (who better to analyze for ad text and landing page cohesion?). Here are some ad/landing page combinations matched with the term landing page optimization : Ad text Landing page: The ad text here makes a promise of simplicity, ease, a lack of coding and a free trial. Then the page itself offers a mention of do it yourself landing page optimization and the page is very clean and simple, which is a nice continuation of the original text. Even more compelling would be a more prominent message surrounding the IT-free aspect of the landing page software. While the text about not sending traffic to the home page may well resonate with many of the clickers on the original ad, even tighter integration between the ad and the landing page would ensure that the people who clicked would be very likely to convert.

9 Ad text Landing page: This is a great example of a strong connection between ad copy and landing page: the text used in the ad is carried through to the landing page and the page does a great job of meeting expectations. Anyone who clicked that ad and came to this landing page should be likely to convert. The only additional opportunity to deliver even better on the copy would be to restate the 50% improvement with a quote and/or case study somewhere on the page. Ideally, any promise you make in your ad copy will be paid out on your landing page: that way the visitor has no excuse to leave without becoming a lead or sale!

10 The High Impact of Click-Through Rate Obviously, as an advertiser, you can t get any conversions without clicks, but there s more to an increased click-through rate than just getting more clicks: you re also impacting your campaign in a number of other ways, including the cost that you re paying for those specific clicks and conversions. How Click-Through Rate Impacts Quality Score & Ad Rank As with many things, many pay-per click platforms have followed Google s lead in how they charge for and rank ads. Major ad platforms like Facebook and adcenter have some concept of a Quality Score or bonus that helps determine pricing and ad rank, and is heavily reliant upon click-through rate. In this section we ll walk through how Google calculates it s Quality Score for the AdWords search network so that you understand the role click-through rate can play in your ad campaigns. According to Google s Chief Economist Hal Varian the rough break-down of factors in computing Quality Score are as you see in the pie chart below the main components are click-through rate and relevance factors, which has to do with the synergy of aligning ad copy with keywords and ultimately landing pages. Landing pages are listed as a significant component here as well, but it s widely accepted that landing pages only play a role if your offering is wholly deceptive or containing malware. The graphic clearly depicts that CTR is a major piece of the Quality Score puzzle, but that leaves us with two questions: 1) Why is Quality Score important? 2) Why Would Google Want to Rely on CTR so Much? What Quality Score is and why it s important could be the subject of a white paper itself (and as a matter of fact, has on many occasions see the addendum for a collection of great resources on the topic of Quality Score). While we won t delve overly deep into the topic of Quality Score, it s important to understand how it can impact the ad auction.

11 There are two pertinent formulas to keep in mind. The first is how ads are ranked: Bid X Quality Score = Ad Rank Your bid and your Quality Score will determine your ad rank. This means that if you have a lower bid than someone else, but a higher Quality Score, you can achieve a higher rank than them despite their willingness to pay more. It s also important to understand how the formula works in the event that you do outrank someone, which leads us to our second formula: Actual CPC = Ad Rank Below Yours / Quality Score + $.01 You can see this whole pricing system played out in the example below: Advertiser Max CPC Quality Score Rank # Position Min Bid Actual CPC A $ ($0.40 x 1.8) 1 $.04 $0.37 B $ ($0.65 x 1.0) 2 $.05 $0.39 C $ ($0.25 x 1.5) 3 $.04 $0.04 Advertiser A is getting the top ad position and paying less than advertiser B for each click! Being able to maximize exposure and minimize costs is a powerful opportunity that increased Quality Scores (and by and large, increased click-through rates) can create. So Why Click-Through Rate? By now it s likely obvious that Quality Score is a major (one of only two) component in the ad auction, and it s clear that CTR is a key factor in establishing Quality Score. So why does Google (and now other pay-per click platforms as well) put so much stock in high click-through rates? Click-through rate works anywhere from pretty well to very well for all three participants in the ad auction: Google and the PPC providers get paid per click, so the greater the number of clicks, the greater the profits. Searchers will click on ads that are compelling, and advertisers are incented (through Quality Score and the impact on conversion rate) to synchronize compelling ads with consistent landing page experiences. Advertisers will get more traffic for a lower price per visitor through higher click-through rates, and if they re creating a great experience from search query through to landing page, they ll get more conversions for a lower cost per conversion. Thus high click-through rates within well-aligned campaigns can mean more business for less money!

12 How to Create Ads for Clicks & Conversions So it s clearly important to create a high level of consistency throughout your pay-per click campaigns, and it s also very important to compel searchers or visitors to click on your ads. Now the question becomes: how do we create these ads? There are seven key tactics you can leverage to help improve your click-through rates while also increasing conversions: 1) Attract attention with the headline or with your image You re going to be competing for attention with other ads, with other search listings, or with a Website s content. There are a lot of different ways to grab attention in the headline, but the most effective involve thinking through the searcher or personas motivations. Grab their attention by speaking directly to their biases, fears, or aspirations. 2) Use benefits liberally Speak to the end result a searcher or visitor is looking for more so than the inputs that get them there. If you re selling a widget that increases productivity because of a great feature that is built on the back of your fantastic technology, focus on the productivity enhancement in your ad text (you can always include more information about how you do what you do on your landing page if necessary). 3) Differentiate your offering This is a great means of attracting that attention with your headline, ad text, or the body of your ad. Great examples of differentiators are: a.price b.unique benefits that may not apply to everyone but that your competitors can t lay claim to (an apartment that accepts pets may not be interesting to everyone, but if your competitors don t this may be a great way to stand out and grab the attention of pet owners, who also happen to be great prospects who can t get what you re offering anywhere else c. Stats If you have case studies of customers experiencing x% better performance or y% cost savings with your product call that out in the ad it ll likely be an eye-catching, unique number. d. Credientials & Social Proof Won an award? Have a lot of customers? Have impressivesounding customers? Including this in the ad copy can lend a level of credibility to your ad that other advertisers can t provide. 4) Speak to the pain points of your audience If you can get inside the mind of your audience and understand what their pain points are, speaking to those is a great way to grab their attention and move them to action.

13 5) Include keywords where appropriate With search ads including the keywords you re targeting in your ad means that your copy will be bolded and that it will speak directly to what the searcher typed in. Doing this when it s unnatural or when the rest of the advertisers in your vertical are doing it can be counter-productive, but in many cases including a keyword is a great way to increase clickthrough rate and conversions. 6) Include a strong call to action A surprising number of ads don t actually explicitly ask the searcher or visitor to do anything. Your ad needs to have a clear next-step laid out and should compel people to do what you want them to do. If you offer a white paper, you need to do better than just closing the add with Free whitepaper! You want to have an explicit CTA like Download a Free Whitepaper Today! 7) Always be testing your ad copy! The most important of the best practices is to test. Test. Test. As you can see from this short list, there are a number of different tactics and approaches to writing ad text that can be successful. The only way to truly know which is the best fit is to test. If you re not testing various possible ads, you re likely leaving improved click-through rates and increased conversions. How to Truly Optimize Your Ads The Art and Science Behind Ad Testing Perhaps the most important component in creating great ad text is an ability and willingness to test. One crucial component in effective advertising is deciding which ad to run. The search platforms (most notably AdWords) offer some tools here that allow you to automatically optimize for the best clickthrough rate. In some instances this can be helpful, for instance as you first start a campaign, as it can help you to get your click-through rates up and establish a high initial Quality Score as well as getting you the most possible initial feedback in terms of actual visitors to your site: from there you have more data to start tinkering. Eventually though you ll likely want to move to a rotate setting for your ads (in AdWords this is set at the campaign level) so that you have a bit more control over your campaigns. In most instances it s not worth banging your head up against a mathematical wall on the issue of statistical significance however: smart people have already done the math for you. Here are a few handy resources to allow you to keep control of your ads while also ensuring that you re not ending an ad test too soon: PPC Ad Testing for Statistical Significance PPC Ad Text Testing Using Google Math Split Tester SEO Book Split Test Calculator By plugging your own data from your tests into these spreadsheets and calculators, you can get a quick idea of whether you re ready to pick a winning ad or not.

14 So Which Groups Should I Write Ads For? An equally important (and slightly trickier) aspect of ad copy writing than determining when an ad test is providing definitive and valid results is determining which groups you should actually write new ad text for. Now that we have an idea of what ad text best practices look like and we understand that we should constantly be testing, how do we know which ads we should set up tests for? The Boost CTR writing platform runs a number of calculations to bubble up the best candidates for new ad tests, and while the calculations are complex the core guiding principles behind those calculations are fairly simple: 1)Test Where The Traffic Is - The first metrics you want to look at in determining what to write ads for are clicks and cost at the ad group level. The ad groups that spend the most money are the ones that have the biggest impact on your business, and similarly the ad groups that send you the most traffic are those that represent the biggest opportunity to drive more and better qualified traffic with improved ad text. Minor tweaks and small percentage improvements on your most heavily trafficked groups will often have a bigger impact on your business than sea-change shifts on less active ad groups. 2) Don t Set it and Forget It Beyond looking at the most heavily trafficked groups, you also want to make sure that you don t have any ad groups that are dormant from a testing perspective the way that people search and convert is constantly changing, and stale ads are often ineffective ads. If you haven t written an ad for a group in six months, that s a great candidate for improvement. 3) Your Ads Are Beatable - Every ad stands a chance of being beaten, particularly over time. We ve seen substantial percentage increases in click-through rate and conversion come as a result of seemingly minor tweaks in capitalization, punctuation, or the introduction of a single new word in an ad. This means that there is a near infinite number of possible alternatives to your current ad copy, and that amongst that universe of possible alternatives some exist that could beat your current ads. For this reason we believe an ad that hasn t been beaten in a year (even if there s been extensive testing) represents an opportunity for improvement. Obviously any timelines laid out above are rough guidelines and will vary depending on the size of the account and the amount spent, but the main premise here is that you should constantly be looking for opportunities to improve your creative and your results, and that cost, clicks, and how recently you ve tested and/or beaten an ad are great indicators for where to go next in your optimization efforts.

15 How Much of an Impact Can Testing Have? Below you can see examples of the impact testing can have on an ad s performance all three of the ad tests below increased CTR by over 100%, meaning that Quality Scores were improved and the advertisers received double the amount of relevant traffic on their site BoostCTR Ad Original Ad CTR + 134% Appeals to searcher's emotion Creates a vivid image URL Reinforces message CTR + 196% Massive is a strong lead in Strong call to action Clearance implies need to sell ASAP CTR + 172% Attention grabbing heading for content network Emphasizes immediate results Qualified agents denotes exclusively of offer Ad testing is a great place to end this guide, because great testing is basically just the most effective means of implementing all of the other components of great ad copy and creative. Understanding ad copy best practices is important. Knowing the different types of things that you should be including in your tests is certainly critical in creating great and high performance ads. Knowing how to take your copy and integrate it into a campaign so that it effectively communicates to your prospect based on where they ve been and where you re sending them next is the only way to maximize your conversions. But even if you execute against all of that, to generate truly remarkable results you have to go beyond creating one good to great ad you need to create a number of different variations and then allow the searchers and visitors to show you which single version is truly the best for your bottom line. Every time you create an ad group or campaign without setting up, analyzing, and iterating on an ad copy test; you re leaving traffic and, more importantly, money on the table.

16 About Boost CTR Boost CTR is an ad text service that guarantees improved ad performance. The platform is crowd sourced ad creation using only expert pay-per click copywriters. Boost makes its marketplace of high-quality copywriters available to advertisers riskfree by guaranteeing improved performance. Boost CTR also offers copywriters a chance to leverage their skills and earn lucrative pay outs by optimizing ad text for some of the world's largest companies such as Expedia, Cafe Press, The Weather Channel, and more. You can sign up for a risk-free initial trial of the service and have your current ad beaten: guaranteed or your money back. Addendum - Additional Resources Basic Resources About Pay-Per Click Platforms Google AdWords Advertising Resources: Customers Now - A great ebook on contextual advertising High Resolution PPC - An outstanding free ebook on paid search advertising by Craig Danuloff from Click Equations Google offers a nice free overview PDF Facebook Advertising Resources: Facebook s Own Guide to Facebook Advertising Mapping Brands to Facebook PPC A quick overview of Facebook Ads from the perspective of a search marketer A really interesting and in-depth video on Facebook best practices by Shoemoney (it s largely geared towards affiliate marketers but there are a lot of great takeaways for any advertiser) Microsoft adcenter: This post by Brad Geddes does an outstanding job of outlining the differences between AdWords and Microsoft adcenter - once you have a handle on how AdWords works, this guide will help you understand how adcenter is different. Quality Score Resources: Introduction to the Google Ad Auction (Video of Google Employee Hal Varian) WordStream s Quality Score Toolkit Brad Geddes AdWords Quality Score Chart What is Quality Score? How is it Calculated? (AdWords Help) PPC Hero s Quality Score Handbook Google AdWords Quality Score Factors Demystified The Economics of Quality Score