Increasing your Click Score

When it comes to paying per click advertising, the primary motives of any advertiser is to decrease the advertising spend and increase conversions.

The conversion rate can be greatly enhanced by incorporating effective landing pages. On the other hand, advertising budget can be reduced by lowering cost per click (CPC) but it would also lower your Ad position and the click-through rate (CTR). Therefore, writing effective Ad copies is arguably the best approach to reduce spending and increase the click-through rate.

In this tutorial, we cover 10 industry best practices for writing effective Ad copies.

1. Use Trademark and Registered  symbols:

If you or your client has a registered ® or trademarked ™ company name, you can very well leverage it to your benefit. The use of these symbols not only helps to make your Ads stand out but also instils a sense of confidence in your prospective buyers. Both these attribute will greatly assist you in realizing an increase in click-through rate.

Now here’s the twist. You can use trademarked names in the display URL even if you don’t own the trademark. Google’s trademark policy states that trademarked names can be freely used by anyone in display URLs. Be advised not to use it to mislead prospective buyers.

2. Use capital letters strategically:

Is it better to capitalize the first letter of every word or the first letter of important words in your Ad copy? You can’t know this for sure until you test it.

Capitalization is a common best practice to grab the attention of your potential customers and to make your Ads stand out amongst the rest. There is no set method for the use of capitalization in Ad copies. It all boils down to how creative you can get with your Ads. “WOW, Big Sale” should serve as a good example.

3. Test display URLs:

While experimenting with trademarked names and capitalization in display URLs to increase the CTR is common, you should not ignore testing display URLs with targeted keywords in them.

You can either have your display URLs set as keyword.domainname.com or domainname.com/keyword. Additionally, you can use dynamic keyword insertion in your display URLs to boost your CTR.

4. Learn from your competitors:

Creative borrowing has been a copywriting principle for decades, so don’t shy away from taking ideas from your competitors. Technically you should only be taking ideas but there is no harm in mixing a few Ad copies to make your own.

Having said that, don’t be afraid to try something different from what your competitors are doing. It is the best way to stand out and grab some eyeballs.

5. Use shock advertising:

Increasing CTR with shock advertising is an interesting approach. Though it may not be applicable under all circumstances and has a lot of caveats attached, it’s well worth a try.

The message employed in shock advertising is often controversial, bold and provocative, and immediately stands out. The challenge is to incorporate it in your Ad copy and reflect it in your landing.

6. Be judicious with words and spaces:

With only 95 characters at your disposal, it is imperative to make each character count. The space in a pay per click ad is extremely limited – a prime property you can not afford to waste.

Keep you Ad copies simple and concise. The message should be loud and clear, and your offering should be easy to understand

7. Don’t over commit and under deliver:

The golden rule while prospecting customers is not to over commit and under deliver. It is essential that the Ad copy sets the right user expectation and the same expectation is affirmed on the landing page.

While the use of certain trigger words like “free” can certainly boost the CTR, it is not advisable to do so if the same is not applicable. Not only will it drive away prospects but it will also hurt your campaign score.

8. Check spelling and grammar:

This one is downright obvious and many of us take it for granted. But it is not uncommon to make typing errors and grammatical mistakes here and there. Such errors adversely affect your credibility and image. In the worst-case scenario, your Ad might end up being disabled by the moderator costing you valuable time.

The last two points are not directly related to the click-through rate of an Ad but are important nonetheless.

9. Use Negative Keywords:

While you are out there prospecting potential customers in a ‘bold and beautiful’ style, you don’t want to be attracting everyone. If you sell a high-end product line it makes no sense in presenting yourself in front of a searcher looking for cheap stuff.

Negative keyword in PPC is the way to prevent your Ads from appearing for certain keywords when running the campaign on broad or phrase match.

10.  Make Ad relevant to the landing page:

As with negative keywords, writing Ads which are relevant to the landing page will not impact the CTR in the least bit. It may however affect the landing page quality score. But there is something more important than the quality score.

11. Landing Page Ads:

If your Ad copy is in conflict with your landing page you will have a lot of qualified prospects hitting the back button. It is therefore imperative that your Ad copy is in sync with the landing page in order to achieve high conversions.

The PPC Ad optimization tips cannot possibly be used all at once and will not always make a better Ad. It is quintessential to comprehend that writing great Ad copies is a continuous and iterative process, and you can glean your own best practices by systematically analyzing your Google AdWord’s data.