The Advertiser's Guide to Writing Profitable Pay-Per Click

16 Pages·2011·5.63 MB·English

CCTTRR
The Advertiser’s Guide to Writing
Profitable Pay-Per Click
A BoostCTR White Paper
CCTTRR
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 cam-
paign 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 audi-
ence.
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.
Copyright 2011 Boost CTR. All rights reserved.
CCTTRR
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 differ-
ence 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:
Copyright 2011 Boost CTR. All rights reserved.
CCTTRR
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 identi-
fying 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 match-
ing 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 And we could even test an ad that uses the more
we saw in our search query report like this: 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 creat-
ing and executing ad copy testing later in the guide).
Copyright 2011 Boost CTR. All rights reserved.
CCTTRR
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:
Copyright 2011 Boost CTR. All rights reserved.
CCTTRR
There are some powerful options here, and you can see how we could possibly write some very com-
pelling ad creative for the Facebook user who:
Lives in areas we can cost efficiently ship to
Is a male between the ages of 25-30
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 key-
words on the display network. While search keywords serve to create the highly specific ques-
tion 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.
Copyright 2011 Boost CTR. All rights reserved.
CCTTRR
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,
A question is asked or
Placements &
demand is revealed
Personas
An answer is given that
Ad Copy
Makes a Promise
The promise is
Landing Page fulfilled (or not!)
Copyright 2011 Boost CTR. All rights reserved.
CCTTRR
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 combina-
tions 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 continua-
tion 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.
Copyright 2011 Boost CTR. All rights reserved.
CCTTRR
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!
Copyright 2011 Boost CTR. All rights reserved.
CCTTRR
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 mal-
ware.
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.
Copyright 2011 Boost CTR. All rights reserved.