Boost Your CTR With These 5 PPC Ad Copy Strategies

The compounding factors of improved CTR, increased quality score, and reduced CPC can make a tremendous impact on performance. Ad copy testing lies at the heart of seizing this competitive advantage.

With an endless number of attributes to test, it can be a little daunting to pick a starting point. Looking for a positive impact? Here are five ad copy attributes you can test.

1. Price Points & Percentage Off

If you’re a retailer, this is must. You're missing out big if you aren't testing into specific price points and percent off offers.

Important: don't make assumptions here. Test out multiple price points and percentages off to find out what will resonate with consumers. Here’s one of my favorite illustrations of why not to assume anything when it comes to price points:

A 76.5 percent CTR lift on the higher price point. We can make assumptions as to why the higher of the two price points experienced the higher CTR. Maybe the “or Less” factored in, or maybe “$39” just sounded too good to be true. Hard to say. This is precisely why we test.

2. Google Sitelinks

By now you have hopefully enjoyed the benefits of running Google Sitelinks in your ads. The presence of ad sitelinks can lift CTR by more than 30 percent.

Surprisingly, many advertisers still haven't added these to their campaigns. Maybe they’ve tested it and found that their ads perform better without sitelinks, but this is doubtful. I haven’t seen an instance where an ad's CTR decreased as a result of having sitelinks present.

Don’t let your sitelinks get stale. Remember to rotate in new pages to test, and test variations of the ad copy. Keep refining.

3. “Official Site”

Using “Official Site” directly following the name of the brand in the ad headline has almost always lifted CTR and reduced CPC. There is an absolute correlation between the power of the brand and the influence that “Official Site” will have on improving performance.

Recognizable brands that carry more weight will typically benefit from this. In instances where there are many affiliates competing in the space, the brand will also benefit from this tactic.

“Brand Name – Official Site” can also lift performance on non-brand terms, especially in instances where the brand is considered a leader. Depending on your account, it may be worth experimenting with this.

With the recent modification of Google displaying the root URL of the display URL within the headline, there’s been speculation that “Official Site” many not be as necessary as it once was, and those valuable headline characters can be better utilized. Sounds like another great test!

4. Sense of Urgency

Any good direct marketer understands this principle. Give consumers a reason to feel as though they should decisively take action, and they are more likely to do so.

If you're running an offer in your ad copy – and you should be if you can – test using an end date. Here are some iterations that work well:

• “Ends 6/11” – a specific end date. Drop this in the ad copy about five days prior to the end date
• “Ends Monday” – test using the day of the week vs. the actual date
• “Hurry!”, “Save Now”, “Ends Soon” – Even without an end date, there are ways to create that sense of urgency with the consumer

5. Extended Headline

This is another recent modification to how Google displays ads. You no doubt have seen this, and hopefully have been experimenting with it.

SEO with Marketing

Our goal for any campaign is to better to align as many marketing channels as possible with SEO best practices in order to better leverage all of these marketing activities from an organic search perspective. Additionally, we wanted to improve the internal communication, especially around keywords. To do that, we concentrate on the following areas of focus:

1. Internal Communication
2. Keyword Management
3. Digital Content Strategy
4. Social Media
5. PR Optimization
6. Training

Let's discuss some of the tactics that we used to successfully align each of these areas of focus with SEO best practices.

Internal Communication

Improving the lines of communication within any organization is the cornerstone of our success. Getting everyone focused on the same goals will always have a tangible effect and produce better results than would have otherwise been possible. In order to better align the members of various marketing teams, we provide them with keyword lists that are relevant to whatever projects they are working on. Some folks get the whole keyword set and some got a subset of the overall keyword list depending on their role in the company. Once those keywords had been provided, we trained each of those groups on how they could implement those keywords into the activities that they were responsible for (more about training later).

Equally important is getting this entire initiative prioritized by management and having that priority communicated to all of the teams that we were working with. Having upper level management communicate the priority of search to the entire company is critical. Additionally, demonstrating through analytics data how important SEO is to the marketing and sales efforts of the company is another key initiative.

The other piece of the puzzle is a high degree of collaboration including weekly SEO team meetings and participation in marketing meetings. These tactics are very successful in improving communication and getting everyone aligned with the goals and objectives of our SEO campaign.

Keyword Management

Segmenting keywords into campaigns based on business objectives and then within those campaigns, segmenting by keyword group is a very important part of our process. Not only does the segmentation allow for more granular understanding of SEO performance, but it also makes it easier for us to provide relevant keywords to various marketing teams. Content writers and bloggers are given keywords that were relevant to their area of focus whereas other marketers are given the entire list depending on their role. Obviously training all these folks on how to use the keywords is a critical piece as well. But the segmentation of keywords makes a big difference in the campaign.

Digital Content Strategy

Once the keywords have been identified and segmented, a content gap analysis is performed to illustrate where sufficient content is needed to address the keywords that they had targeted. Additionally, a lot of the marketing content often lives behind an authentication wall (you have to register to download a whitepaper for example). Creating optimized landing pages for this content that is targeted towards relevant keywords with content previews (snippets) helps open that content up to search. We also collaborate with various content producers to create new content (both text and video) that is aligned with company goals and marketing objectives. Keyword research is really user research that explains how your targeted audience is using language to describe your goods, services and concepts in your industry. Therefore, aligning your marketing content with those keywords means that you are talking the same language as the people you are trying to sell to which not only improves your search rankings but also improves your conversions because people understand what you are saying.

The main goal within the Digital Content alignment is to have the people who are producing digital assets on an ongoing basis get the education that they need to create optimized content from inception. In other words, our SEO team wouldn't need to optimize every new page on the site because it was built from an optimization perspective to begin with.

Social Media

Social Media is a huge area of focus for us. In addition to using social media channels like Blogging, Twitter, YouTube and Facebook to extend messaging, promote content and engage our target audience, we want to use social media to create thought leadership, consistently produce new keyword focused content, and acquire new, relevant links that will make a difference in our SEO campaign. In addition to the keyword lists and training that we provide to social media teams, another successful tactic is a consistent posting schedule for all social media platforms for their content. We create what we called a Digital Asset Chart that gives instructions on how and where to promote each type of digital asset (blog post, video, webinar, etc). This way we always have a consistent approach to promoting content through social media, no matter whose job is ends up being.

PR Optimization

One of the most important vehicles for link building any company is press release optimization. By training PR teams on SEO best practices, we are able to make each release more impactful to the overall SEO campaign. The releases get more traffic because they get more search traffic, even if they live on someone else's domain. And, because they are created with relevant, embedded links that point back to our clients’ Websites, every time the release is picked up, they get new, valuable links. Obviously this tactic is only successful when you're company has something meaningful to say.

SEO Training

This is another cornerstone in the success of this SEO campaign. Empowering people within the organization to make their own contributions to the SEO campaign is a huge priority for us in any engagement because ultimately it's easier to scale across a large organization than trying to have one SEO team do everything. We conducted training for the following groups of people:

• Content writers
• Bloggers
• PR Team
• Social Media Team
• Internal SEO Resources
• Management
• IT

And depending on which group we were training, we covered the following topics:

• Keyword Research
• On Page Optimization (Content Optimization + Meta data + Page Titles)
• PR Optimization
• Social media / SEO best practices
• Link optimization (Internal and External)
• Site wide optimization (Technical Issues)

By demystifying SEO across various groups within the company, we were able to align all of the groups against the goals and priorities of the SEO campaign.

By aligning all of these marketing groups with those goals and aligning their activities with SEO best practices, we have been able to help many clients achieve significant gains in organic search. Hopefully this model can provide a template for others to follow to achieve similar results.

Google Panda Update SEO Survival Tips

Google Panda 2.2 is looming to drop sometime soon, and with it, increasing levels of apprehension in the small business community on fears of further collateral damage to organic search traffic. As a speaker at SES Toronto this year, I had the distinct honor of accompanying Dave Davies,Thom Craver and Terry Van Horne on a panel to discuss the impact of Google Panda, and long-term strategies for SEO success.

Diversify Your Traffic

Much to my own amazement and to that of my peers on stage, many in attendance at SES Toronto felt that they received significantly more traffic from Google organic search than any other source, and that SEO traffic converted much better than other sources.

As a general rule of thumb, no more than 40 percent of your referred traffic should come from Google because any significant change is bound to have a negative impact on your bottom line. When you consider how long it can take to notice and recover from an SEO penalty for even small mistakes (such as server downtime, bad navigational links, forgotten redirects, etc.), putting all your eggs into one basket substantially increases your risk.

Normally I wouldn't disagree with a large group at SES, but to say organic traffic converts better than other sources indicates that very few attendees are properly optimizing their paid search campaigns. Why? Paid search marketing has several distinct advantages over organic search traffic that should yield higher conversion:

• Product: Guaranteed exposure to only those products and services you want to promote in search results. Match keywords to exact product offerings and watch conversion skyrocket.
• Price: In this case, it’s not the price of the product or services offered, but the price your business pays for the traffic itself. Don’t forget to factor in all the time and effort invested into ranking for keywords in organic results, and how often changes may be required.
• Promotion: While you can change the content surrounding your products, you may not have the same amount of creative license to change that content as quickly for mainstay (SEO targeted) pages versus paid search landing pages, nor will you necessarily have control over which pages Google chooses to display in results pages for any given query.
• Place: Distribution of your product won’t change, but distribution of your product in organic SERPs may be highly elastic versus highly-controllable paid search campaigns.
• People: Perhaps the most important component is your inability to control and target behavioral cues in search queries using SEO. It doesn’t get much better than the complete control that multiple keyword match types, negative match keyword lists, and advanced query performance reporting affords a search marketer.

My final argument about why organic search traffic may not convert as well as other sources? Visitor intent.

Visitors coming from organic search results for the first time are extremely hard to convert, and it can take several repeat visits, if your content is good enough, to finally convert them sometime down the line.

Measure Success Using Actionable KPIs

I love data, but much of it is useless and not actionable. In terms of useless SEO metrics, here are a few:

• “Average position” and “Impressions” as provided by Google Webmaster Tools are useless metrics because Google varies position by geographic locale, personalized results (when logged in), and likely past-user behavior (not logged-in cookies).
• “Visits” and “Page Views” and even “Average Time Spent” as measured using analytics software aren't as useless, unless used alone because webmasters have little control over how much traffic search engines send them.

The emphasis should be put on measuring actionable KPI’s segmented by traffic source such as bounce rate, micro and macro conversion rates, revenue, and visitor loyalty.

Want to get really sophisticated? Try testing out multi-source attribution and start assigning real dollar values to each one of your traffic sources touch points.

Build a Community

The group was decidedly split on the influence of social media on Google Panda, due in part to a tangent discussion on how Google might one day leverage social signals from Google +1. As it stands, Google currently uses Twitter’s “fire hose” feed and some signals from public pages on Facebook to influence rankings, the former weighing much more heavily in substantial, but short-lived SEO boost.

Google’s modus operandi seems to have always been to show up late to a party, build their own dance floor, and either win people over, or buy out their best competitor (YouTube, DoubleClick, Postini, Urchin, etc). In much the same respect, it will take time to see whether Google +1 gains enough momentum and critical mass to make a sizeable dent on the hundreds of other “favoriting” sites like Digg, Reddit, Delicious, and StumbleUpon, to name a few.

Don’t look to social media to build links for SEO because the best links come from establishing earned media from a community of loyal brand ambassadors. Talk to your visitors and customers, engage communities, and start practicing the art of building personas. Through careful research, webmasters can hone into communities online that serve the best bang for their buck, and those might not be in any of the top social websites.

If you invest time into building a community, your business isn’t as likely to be as hard hit by changes to search algorithms such as Google Panda.

Competitive SEO Analysis

On Site Research

Marios Alexandrou, Rosetta

When conducting on site (i.e. within your competitor’s site) competitive analysis, start by:

1) Asking yourself, “what companies should I look at?” Compete.com can come in handy here. Enter a handful of competitors and look for companies with high traffic. These are the companies that will likely have characteristics that will help inform your SEO approach.

2) Assessing your competitors site. Be sure to divide on site components into 3 categories: Content, Technical and Internal Links. By segmenting, you can more easily identify their strengths, as well as their areas of weakness.

3) Crawling competitor sites by leveraging crawler tools like Xemu. This will help determine:

• size of site
• links to internal pages
• popular search term pages
• Google Index

Once you have conducted your research, create a matrix to get a full picture of the competitive landscape. Do this by listing your competitors within excel on the y-axis and cross reference them against criteria (x-axis) like: Targets Long Tail, Optimized Title Tags, Internal Linking, Image Content, etc.

Off Site Research

Ross Dunn, StepForth Web Marketing

One of the most important elements to consider when performing off site research (i.e. looking at factors outside your competitor’s website) is quantity and quality of their external links.

Like on site research, off site analysis by identifying the competitors. One way to determine your competition is to enter core phrases like “mountain bikes” as well as long tail phrases like “brand x mountain bike parts”. Survey the search engine results page (SERP) for top ranking businesses. Be sure to weed out wikipedia and other non-competitive sites.

Now that you understand the different players, follow Ross’s tips for off site analysis.

1) Create Advanced Reports within Majestic SEO for each competitor and export the list to excel

2) Manually review top 50 links for each competitor and ask yourself:

• is their anchor text relevant?
• is their relevant on page content?
• do they have quality on page content?

3) Find and highlight shared links among 3 competitors (hub links). These links are likely attainable and have value for your search results.

4) Look for biased links (i.e. hundreds of supposed different all linking to the same page with the exact same anchor text should raise some flags)

Don’t recreate the wheel. Learn from your competition’s link efforts to elevate your online strategy.

PPC Research

Matt Van Wagner, FindMeFaster

Start your PPC research with the mindset that to succeed you need to go beyond obvious questions like “what keywords are my competitors buying?” to ask questions like “where is the biggest area of opportunity?” Both questions are important, but the latter will help you look past competitive data to focus on the opportunities that can be gleaned from your research.

Quality PPC research tools are plenty, but before you start your research, arm yourself with questions that will help you hone in on key aspects of PPC.

How many ads are they running? How many different messages/offers do they present? Are they using best practices (i.e. do relevant keywords appear in ad titles)? How often do they present new ads? Do they react to bid changes?

With these types of question in mind, here’s a list of some of Van Wagner’s favorite tools for competitive PPC research:

• AdGooroo
• Compete
• iSpionage.com
• Keyword Competitor
• Keyword Spy
• Comscore

Walking into this session, I have to admit that I was looking for the silver-bullet. The one tool that does EVERYTHING. The truth, as we all know, is that although there are powerful competitive research programs, your approach to competitive analysis is truly your most powerful tool. Learn from competitors by researching their efforts with a laser-like focus.

To borrow a line from Alexanderou, “copying your competitors doesn’t make you better than them. It makes you the same.” Determine their strengths. Determine their weaknesses. Incorporate these lessons to take your program to another level.