Internet Marketing RSS 2.0
# Sunday, October 05, 2008

Google penalizes Adwords ads with poor click through rates. If your ad is not generating clicks, it's making it more expensive for you to advertise. Discover how to improve the click through rate of your ads.

Your Adwords ad is sales copy. You are attempting to persuade a potential consumer to make a decision based on your ad text. This is the art a science of sales copy. Sales copy can be defined as salesmanship in print.

The trick in Adwords is that you only have 95 characters to do it in (25 character headline + 2 lines of 35 character description). That is daunting task for any professional salesman.

The following tips can improve the sales copy in both your Adwords ads and in your landing page or sales letter.

1) Speak to the customer
A general rule of sales copy is that you want to appeal directly to the consumer. By using the word you, you address the consumer in a direct personal way, as if you were speaking to them. Use you in your sales copy instead of your product name or I.

2) People buy solutions, not products or services
Another general rule of sales copy is that a customer is looking to find a solution, not buy a product. A customer doesn't want to buy a drill, instead they need a way to make a hole. You need to sell a solution. A perfect example of this are Billy Mays TV commercials for Hercules hooks, Oxyclean, OrangeClean or any of his products. Did you ever notice the commercial starts by describing or creating a problem? The commercial then proceeds to persuade you that they have the solution to the problem. The commercials are like that because the method works.

3) Feature versus Benefit
You may be tempted to list a prominent feature of your product. Don't. Instead, make a list of every feature you can think of. Then write down the corresponding reason the customer would want that feature. You can often move from feature to benefit by using "what that means to you, Mr. Customer is". That becomes a benefit. Then don't describe a feature in your ad, but describe a benefit.

4) Use a Call to Action
A Call to Action is a sentence instructing the consumer to perform a task. The consumer will often be subconsciously persuaded to do it. A call to Action generally begins with a verb (the action). Here are some examples.

  • Click here.
  • Download your copy now.
  • Call now.
  • Get help.

5) Keyword or Phrase
Your ad will be more attractive to the customer if your ad text contains the keyword or phrase they searched on. Right away your customer will view your ad has highly relevant, because the keyword is right there. The headline is a particularly good place to have the keyword since your customer sees it first. this tactic is done automatically if you use the Adwords strategy from adwords-marketing-tool,com

6) Use Free if applicable
Using the word free is likely to increase your CTR. Make sure your landing page does freely give away what you promised.

7) Hype words
Hype words like amazing or incredible may help you attract attention. But be careful, overuse them and you sound like a snake oil salesman.

8) Sense of urgency
You can create a sense of urgency with a phrase like limited offer. This encourages a customer to make a purchase on the spot. If you have the space available, you can describe the consequences of failing to act.

9) No risk
Consumers are cautious of being taken advantage of. A money back guarantee or a no risk free trial helps persuade you consumers.

10) Test your ads
The only way you'll know if your sales copy is working is to test it. Split testing is the accepted method of testing your ads. You run two ads simultaneously. After the proper amount of time, you compare CTR or ROI and declare a winner and remove the lesser ad.

 


#    Comments [0] - Trackback
copywriting
# Saturday, October 04, 2008

Google Adwords can quickly become expensive if it is used incorrectly. The following tips will show you how to correctly setup your campaigns. You'll discover what to do and what to avoid.

1) Use Google's Adwords Editor to manage your campaigns.
The Adwords Editor is free tool from Google that helps you manage your campaigns. It allows you to make bulk or multiple updates to your campaign. This saves you time and effort when compared to making manual changes online.

2) Disable the Content Network.
Beginners should stay away from the Content Network in Google Adwords. When you are just starting out, disable the content network in your PPC campaigns. Traffic from the content network is lower quality than Google search traffic, because it's coming from Google Adsense participants who don't care what quality of traffic they send your website. When you have proven ROI from your website, you can use placement campaigns or regular content network.

3) Set a reasonable daily budget.
You want to throttle your traffic and Adwords spending until you have a proven ROI. When you achieve a good ROI, you can increase the daily budget and increase your traffic. You don't want to throttle your campaign by bidding to low per click, because that can affect your CTR. You need a good CTR to maintain a good quality. Throttling your campaign with a daily budget stops showing your ads, so you won't get impressions and damage your CTR.

4) Don't set your CPC too low.
You don't want to throttle your campaign by bidding too low per click, because that can affect your CTR. You need a good CTR to maintain a good quality. You never want to damage your CTR by bidding to low. In fact, if you begin with a high bid, you can achieve a good CTR. After your achieve the high CTR, you can lower your CPC and still maintain a ad good position, saving money in the long run.

5) Don't hang on to poor performing keyword.
You probably have some keywords and ad groups that are not performing well. The half percent is a good goal for a well performing ad. Any ad group or keyword performing under a half percent with a high number of impressions needs to be altered. The poor performing ads can damage your overall campaign CTR and lower the quality score and position of your other ads. Remove the ad group or keyword. If you decide you simply must have this ad group or keyword, move it to it's own campaign and start split testing sales copy changes.

6) Evaluate your landing pages as if you were performing SEO.
Your landing page is examined and scored by Adwords just like your website is for inclusion on the Google search engine. Performing SEO on your landing pages will improve your quality score. The Google webmaster tools can provide free information on how Google scores your pages.

 


#    Comments [1] - Trackback
Adwords
About the author/Disclaimer

Disclaimer
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.

© Copyright 2012
Dan Smith
Sign In
All Content © 2012, Dan Smith