Quick Ways To Boost AdWords CTR
Higher click through rates have very positive effects such as a boost in quality score which means the cost per click reduces and advert positions improve so it’s worth trying to boost the quality score. Below are some quick wins in the click through ratio battle, In the first few examples we have used “Serviced Offices Manchester” as the search term, serviced offices is a very high cost per click environment and paid search here should be run by people who are experienced and know what they are doing but there’s still room for improvement in some of the adverts.
Quick Ways for You to Boost AdWords CTR :
Extended Headlines
If your ads are shown above the organic results then you can extend your headline to take up more space and get your message across. To make this happen you simply add a period “.” mark to the end of your description line 1. This them makes the description line 1 appear in the headline.
As you can see above the top advert has extended headline yet the next two don’t, the bottom advert would be much stronger if it too had extended headline as it would look read “Serviced Offices Manchester – Serviced Offices From Just £95!” So unless these two advertiser feel their brand identity is stronger than the message they wish to get across they too should extend their headlines and test the results.
Use Sitelinks
Sitelinks are awesome, we love them as they allow you to maximise your click potential for each advert by offering choices to the searcher. As much thought (and testing) should be put into the wording of sitelinks as the adcopy itself. Sitelinks are particularly useful when appearing on more generic keywords as they allow you to funnel users to the most relevant page to them, they may have searched for “service office space manchester” but they may want 1 desk or a full floor, you just don’t know with a search like this so having sitelink extensions would be very useful here to show that you cover both options.
The example above covers both bases here with “Corporate Solutions” for the larger company users as well as “Managed Offices” for the smaller users and out of both adverts using sitelinks it seems to have the best use of them. When using sitelinks try to think of the problems that you can solve for the searcher and phrase your sitelink text to solve these problems.
Use Display URL For Copy Or Branding
The URL can be used to increase click through too by branding or using it to get a message across, all three adverts have made use of the URL to further target their adverts.
Whilst they do geo-locate the ads to Manchester thus highlighting the relevancy they could have tried alternatives, Ideas to consider are offers, seasonal variances, price related factors etc. so the bottom example could have tried domain.co.uk/From-£95 or domain.co.uk/Summer-Sale etc.
Seasonal Headlines
It’s always worth trying to make headlines relevant to the season, it shows that your advert is current and it’s relevant to NOW so the adverts for serviced offices could include the word summer in them (as at the time of writing it’s August!) so how about “Manchester Serviced Offices August Offers” or they could even run bank holiday related adcopy although serviced offices aren’t that sexy so the impact in this case wouldn’t be anything like a product targeted to the general public.
Add Or Remove Prices, Add Discounts
Discounts can be overused so it really depends on what your competitors are doing as to what impact they’ll have. If you are the cheapest then say so, if you aren’t then highlight some other factor (free delivery, or if you don’t do that then how about same day dispatch or eco friendly packaging etc. just find a positive that other advertisers don’t have) or show any discount that you offer, even if you aren’t cheaper then your competitors as once you get users on site you can wow them with your offering. Below you can see free delivery highlighted in the first Smeg offer, then some pricing for random (possibly best selling!?) Smeg dishwashers and finally an advert by sainsburys that doesn’t even have Smeg mentioned in it at all.
Smeg is an expensive brand marketed as a high quality product and most users searching for it would know this, so the Sainsbury’s offer with £199.99 probably wouldn’t tempt a click, on the other hand the Free delivery of the first advert is more prominent than the second advert’s free delivery, It wouldn’t be a surprise if advert number two to get more clicks but it’s a good bet that advert number one would get a click for price comparison.
In the serviced office example only one has pricing in it, From £95, which obviously caters to the lower end of the serviced office spectrum however it’s still a point worth testing, adcopy combining the seasonal and discount CTR boosters could be “Save 10% In Our Summer Serviced Office Sale“
Use Trademarks And Brands
If you are promoting well known Brands that are trademarks then use them, Google naturally focusses on brands, you’ll see that brands rank very high in natural search results because they know they they convert better, users trust and align their values with a brand and this is no different in AdWords.
Making use of brands in your adcopy is fine but you need to ensure that you comply with Google’s T&C’s regarding trademark use if you don’t have authorisation from the trademark holder you can still use trademarks subject to certain conditions being met. These conditions vary depending on the type of site and can be seen here
Use Product Image Ads
When selling products make sure that you test the performance of product image ads, your competitors may or may not be using them but they are definitely worth giving a shot to see how they impact the advert CTR,
If all your competitors are using them then try and use a picture that stands out more, there’s nothing worse than seeing a listing with several identical images so create something unique.
Review And Rating Stars
Social proof is important, Amazon makes massive use of reviews and ratings, it lets other users rate how good or bad products are and in AdWords this can be utilised via approved review/ratings sites that Google takes notice of such as Review Centre, TrustPilot, Reevoo, Feefo etc.
It’s worth noting that bad reviews won’t help click through so it’s in your best interest to ensure that you get good reviews! A good starting point is to hit up previous (happy) customers for reviews, once you get over around 30 reviews and Google has cached them they should start to be pulled into your adverts, if nobody else in your sector is doing this then you should see good things happen to your CTR. If everyone else is doing it already then you’ve missed the boat! Get paddling hard now to catch up!
Give Something Useful Away
People love freebies, so give something away, BUT make sure it’s worthwhile receiving or it could devalue your offering. For professional products users love white papers, well written and branded PDF’s that take the legwork out of making choices. Below is a gold investing example offering free demo and a bonus, white paper and a report.
For the serviced office examples they could go down a couple of different routes, one would be to do a guide to Manchester as some people will be looking to set up an Manchester office as an additional office to their current locations so a guide to Manchester office areas as like most cities Manchester is split into different areas such as ‘Northern Quarter’ and ‘Deansgate Locks’ etc. each with benefits and drawbacks depending on the size and type of company that will be located there.
They could also have gone down the route of explaining pitfalls to watch out for covering what unscrupulous serviced office companies might do “Free White Paper Download – The 10 Ways To Avoid Serviced Office Hell” coupled with a data capture form that is then followed up with a call or at the very least puts the responder into a drip feed email loop.
Conclusion
As with anything in PPC management related testing is key, these points work well alone on some campaigns, combined on most yet on others they’ll add nothing of value or worse; performance may decline! So testing and analysing the resulting data is critical to ensure you are moving forward in a positive way.
