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In my last post, I began to tackle the idea of “qualifying” leads and visits that come to your site through paid search advertising. After all, if we can help it, we’d rather pay for only those clicks that are coming to your site by completing the action that we desire: purchase, sign up, download, or upload, just to name a few conversion points that online marketers target. Remember that qualifying traffic has two parts:
- Promote visits from users who are most likely to drive a conversion
- Eliminate traffic from visitors who are least likely to drive a conversion
If you can optimize your paid search campaign to achieve these things, or at least get better at them, you are well on your way to using your marketing dollars efficiently.
There are several ways to do this tactically. Part 1 of this topic talked about the importance of targeting value-based keywords as well as utilizing “negative” keywords to eliminate traffic from visitors who have very little chance to convert.
This blog post investigates the next step to qualifying search traffic: ad copy optimization.
Step 3: Use Ad Copy to Tell Potential Visitors EXACTLY What You Want Them to DO
Your text-based ad that appears in Google’s paid search results is the last thing that visitors see before clicking through to your site, and thus, incurring you a potentially expensive cost per click. So why not make sure that those users know exactly what they are about to see or do before they add to your Google bill? You can do just that by using language in your ads that talks about exactly what the user will find on the other side of the click. Let’s continue with an example from our friends in the insurance industry who are trying to get visitors to request a quote for their personal insurance. Can you spot the difference between these two pieces of ad copy?
Ad copy #1
California Auto Insurance
Questions about car insurance in CA?
Click here for more info!
CA-auto-insurers.com
Ad copy #2
Auto Insurance Quotes
Get your free car insurance quote
from Acme Insurance today!
Acme-insurance.com
The first ad entices users to click through to a page that is offering broad, generalized insurance information. This could include answers to the questions “what is auto insurance?”, “where can I find a list of California insurance companies?”, and “where can I get some general insurance questions answered?”. This ad doesn’t speak at all to the conversion point, and instead will attract many visits from people looking to satisfy general insurance informational search queries. This will lead to clicks (and cost) from visits that will have a much lower conversion ratio (conversions/clicks). Many of these people will find what they are looking for (or worse, maybe not!), and immediately exit the site with their search intent satisfied.
The second ad speaks much more directly to a subset of potential visitors who are looking to do a particular thing with their insurance search: get an insurance quote. The headline (top line) and description lines speak directly to this point, leaving little to the imagination in the way of what lies on the other side of their click. This will accomplish the two goals that we’ve discussed when trying to qualify traffic:
- It will dissuade many of those visitors who are looking only for general search information, whereby saving us the incurred cost per click for a potentially unqualified visitor
- It appeals particularly well to those who are looking for an insurance quote
Research has shown that the better you can match your ad copy to the actual search that the user performs, the better chance you have in acquiring that user. This is reflected in click-through-rate (CTR), which measures the number of clicks as a percentage of those who are exposed to the ad. If the ad appeals to the searcher, they will click on it. If we can match our ad to their actual search query, we’re more likely to get the click, and if we target our ad and keywords to specifically target an insurance quote, we’re more likely to get the conversion.
That, folks, is the definition of a qualified visitor!
Stay tuned to this blog for our next step in driving qualifying our traffic: paid search-specific landing page optimization.
