Qualify Your Customers With Your Ad Text

With PPC advertising, the best use of ad copy is not just to attract prospects, but sometimes to filter out searchers who are unlikely to become your customers.

Since you pay for each click to your site, when a click-happy searcher pops into your site just to browse or to do a little price comparison, you're probably wasting some of your precious ad spend.

One way to effectively ward off some of these searchers is by including the price of your product or service in your ad. You obviously can't eliminate clicks from these users entirely - if they want to click through, they're going to. But adding the price makes them less likely on average to want to click.

For searchers who sincerely think they might be interested in your product or service, your price acts as a great filter, keeping out prospects that don't want to pay or can't afford your price point. And if the searcher has zero interest in spending money, your price makes it loud-and-clear that they won't be getting any freebies by clicking your ad.

This strategy will likely lower your clickthrough rate (CTR), but this should be the result of filtering out poorly qualified searchers, the very reason that you included the price in the first place. To confirm that this is in fact the case, analyze your conversion rates before and after adding your price to your ads. If it increased after the change, then your strategy was probably successful.

The effectiveness of this strategy will vary substantially depending on your situation. The most obvious time to include your price in your ad copy is when you have the best price. Not only will you be filtering out some poor quality traffic, but the price will double as a unique selling proposition in your space. If you don't have the best price it gets a bit trickier.

If you're not the price leader but almost every other ad on the page includes price for a very similar or identical product or service, then you might have a good reason to throw it in your ad as well. A search results page littered with prices means that the price is a very important factor for this particular product or service. If you don't include your price, searchers are going to click your ad at a high rate just to check out your price and if it's not the best, then they'll probably bounce. But if your price is in your ad, and you are not the price leader, then you can be confident that most clicks are going to come from prospects that don't use price points as their only buying criteria, making them a high quality visitor.

Including your price in your ad text is definitely not a strategy that will help every advertiser using PPC, but if you're having issues with low conversion rates and high CPAs, it's probably smart to give it a try and test it out.

Get more ad writing strategies to test from our free Ad Writing Quick-Reference Guide.

Search is from Mars, Content is from Venus

Google's search and content networks are both great sources of profitable traffic, but they are very different from one another. And in the same way that you wouldn't want unrelated keywords grouped together in your account, you're going to want to keep search and content in their own distinct campaigns.

But what is it that makes them so different?

Audience:
Traffic from the search network is coming from an active group of prospects. This is exactly what makes paid search advertising so unique: you get to show your ad to a prospect at the precise moment that they are seeking your product or service (depending on your keyword list of course).

On the other hand, traffic from the content network is much more passive. You're getting your ad served at a moment when their attention is elsewhere, focused on the content of the site they're on.

Performance:
This variance in user behavior between search and content leads to a large difference in performance. Due to the high level of motivation found in search traffic, the search network tends to have a much higher CTR than content. However, the number of impressions available on content tends to be vastly greater than available search impressions for a given keyword theme since AdSense can be found on so many sites throughout the web, so you can still pick up plenty of clicks from content despite the low CTRs.

Search traffic also tends to convert at a higher rate than content for the same reason. Searchers are pursuing your product or service so they are more likely to become customers after they hit your site than traffic from the content network. Because of this, click prices on the content network are often much lower than search. So, even though conversion rates have a tendency to be lower for content, if the average CPC and conversion rate drop by the same proportion when compared to search, then both networks will be equally profitable.

Targeting:
When considering keywords for search, each keyword is a unique entity that you bid on with its own separate performance from all other keywords in your account. With content however, Google takes a look at all of the keywords in an ad group and applies that ad group a theme that it will use to serve your ads across the content network.

For this reason, search and content ad groups need to be organized differently. There are a lot of keywords that you'll want to throw into content ad groups to round out overall themes that you wouldn't want to put in a corresponding ad group.

An example of this would be adding the keyword "cheese" to a content campaign focusing on Gouda. Also, Google only uses up to 50 keywords from an ad group to determine a theme, so any keywords over 50 in an ad group is always a waste for content.

In Summary:
Due to the major differences between search and content, you would be remiss to try targeting both in the same campaign. They require different keyword organization, ad copy, and analysis for optimizations and targeting both networks in one campaign makes it impossible to do.

Make sure to utilize both networks though, as they both have the potential to be very profitable for your company; just make sure to split them up in your account.

Bid for Profitability, not Pride

Every company wants to be at the front of the pack, leaving their competitors in the dust.

To beat the competition in PPC advertising, your first instinct might be to outbid competitors and get your ad into the top few positions, often located directly above the organic results.

With your ad gloriously perched atop the search results, surely you're at a competitive advantage compared to all those lowly ads on the right side of the page...right?

Well, not necessarily.

With PPC, you don't always get the gold for being in first place. While having your ad in higher positions tends to yield more clicks and therefore more conversions than lower spots, it doesn't always ensure the best return on investment.

If you have to pay twice as much per click to get your ad to the top position but find that it only gets you a few more sales and ultimately cuts into your profits, then you probably wouldn't want to continue that strategy.

And if you're thinking that you might be able to boost your conversion rate by getting your ads to the premium positions, Google's Chief Economist, Hal Varian, shared on the Inside AdWords blog that conversion rates don't vary much by position. He explained that for the same ad, conversion rate only differs by less than 5% on average across all positions.

This is not to say that you should shoot for 4th position necessarily, or any other specific position for that matter. The important thing is that you test how profitable you are in different ad positions and then bid for the ones that work the best for your unique business.