Let’s face it, there’s not a lot of room to be too verbose or overly creative with paid search ads. After all, how much can one do with a 25 character headline and 70 character ad text? Still, it is our job as search marketers to test, test, test! Improving your ad creative by even a point or two can have a very favorable impact on program performance.
‘Practices’ make Perfect
Before you head down the testing path, it’s important to start with the fundamentals to establish good solid creative that can sustain your program and act as the control, prior to venturing into unknown waters. Let’s review best practices for those less familiar:
1. Keyword Relevance – Relevant keywords in your headline reinforce that you offer what the searcher is looking for. Additionally, when the keyword in your ad matches the keyword that was searched, it will appear in bold in the ad. Dynamic Keyword Insertion is very helpful, however, use caution with ad groups containing misspellings or competitor names. Keyword relevance in your ad copy is also a key component to quality score.
2. Promotion/Offer – Discounts or offers will attract users to click on your ad.
3. Value Proposition and Competitive Differentiator – Be clear about the reason that a searcher should click on your ad versus the one above or below it.
4. Lead with the Important Information – People nowadays have less time (and even less patience) to read ad copy so try to keep the most important information at the forefront of your ad.
5. Brand Prominence – Strong brand names will help to set your ad apart from the pack. Your display or visible URL is yet another opportunity to showcase your brand (and it’s another testing opportunity!).
6. Call-to-Action – Use an appropriate call-to-action based upon where the user likely is within the buying cycle. For example, calls-to-action for research-related ad groups may be more along the lines of browse or find, while ads serving on purchase-related ad groups use stronger verbiage such as buy or order.
What now?
So you have best practices down, but how do you turn that into measureable results?
Start out testing three ads per ad group and allow each test to run long enough to be statistically significant. This of course will vary campaign to campaign, but a good rule of thumb is to allow the tests to run for two to three weeks.
Once your ads have received enough data, review what is working and not working. In addition to analyzing click through rate (CTR) on your ads, it will also be important to understand ad performance relative to conversion. Keep in mind that you are ultimately trying to identify the type of messaging that convinces someone to buy your product or service, not just browse your site.
As you gain insight in to your campaign’s performance, think through the rollout plan for new test creative. The optimal approach is to keep the two best performing ads in place, dropping the lowest and introducing one new ad for testing across each of your ad groups.
You might be thinking…when do I get to be creative? Well, I would argue that it takes a lot of creativity to represent a client’s brand messaging using best practices and within limited character constraints! Truth be told, creativity comes in determining what to test and in which ad groups. An easy first step is to review the two winners in each ad group and combine what you perceive to be the strongest points of each in a new ad. Other testing elements might include new offers, calls to action, product features or benefits, different messaging to different target markets, either by geo-, or even customers with a similar mindset…the possibilities are endless.
Seeing the forest for the trees
Perhaps your creative skills are best utilized in matching the right puzzle pieces together. Rather than striving to find a new way of saying the same thing, look at it from the perspective of aligning winning ad copy with the corresponding ad group. If you understand this reality and incorporate best practices into ad copy testing, the result will be a more balanced and ultimately more profitable campaign.
