Understanding the three goals of your ad
Making your ad stand out
Telling your story in four lines
Connecting the ad to your keyword
Compelling — and selectively discouraging — action
Using image, mobile text, local, and video ads
This sentence contains the same number of characters — 130, including spaces — that Google allows you in an ad.
You get four lines of 25, 35, 35, and 35 characters to tell enough of your story to compel the right people to choose your ad over all the other ads and organic listings on the Google search page. If you're advertising on the content network, your ad is competing with articles, videos, games, and more. I've heard professional copywriters say that the Google ad is the most challenging form of salesmanship-in-print they've ever attempted.
Depressed? Don't be. Writing effective ads is hard for everyone, not just you. Spend some time preparing, practicing, and (especially) testing your ads, and you'll quickly rise to the top of your industry. As business philosopher Jim Rohn says, "Don't wish it were easier — wish you were better."
This chapter helps you stop wishing and start improving. First, I explain the three-pronged goal of your ad. Most advertisers focus on one prong only, to their detriment. You discover how to balance the first two goals for maximum profits by bringing in the right kind of traffic (not just the maximum possible traffic), and how to reach the third goal of setting visitor expectations so your prospects are primed for your Web site. Next, you discover how to tune your ad to your prospect's radio station, WII-FM (What's In It For Me?), based on the keyword. I share with you the missing link between your ad and your Web site — the call to action. I cover some basic strategies for effective ad writing, as well as a few top-secret (until now!) "black belt" techniques that you'll need if you're playing in a hyper-competitive market. Finally, I introduce you to some alternatives to the standard text ad: image, mobile text, local business, and video ads.
A good ad attracts the right people — your best prospects — to your Web site. Your ad has three goals:
Generating clicks from qualified visitors
Discouraging the people who are unlikely to become your customers from clicking your ad
Setting your prospects' expectations so that your Web site satisfies (and possibly even delights) them
The following sections discuss these three goals in detail.
The AdWords medium encourages a stepladder approach. The job of the ad is to deliver drooling prospects to your Web site. They don't even have to be drooling over what you want to sell them, just over what you're offering them in the ad. Sometimes the ad offer and the first sale are identical — selling a product they're searching for by name and model. Other times, you're dangling a magnet that will attract the quarters and ignore the wooden nickel. (I talk more about lead-generating magnets in Chapter 10.)
Your four-line ad can't make a sale, any more than a door-to-door salesperson can ring the doorbell, utter one sentence, and sell a $1,000 vacuum cleaner. The first sentence is meant to make the prospect listen to the second sentence. Likewise, the Google ad isn't long enough to capture the prospects' attention, pique their interest, stroke their desire, and make them pull out their credit card. Let your Web site, e-mails, and phone calls accomplish the heavy lifting. Craft your ad to make or imply a promise that your landing page can keep.
Note
The rest of this chapter shows you how to write an attractive ad. Right now, though, I'm going to tell you how to make your ad unattractive. After all, a click means you just paid Google. Clicks from the wrong people can cost you a lot of money without putting any of it back in your pocket.
You may remember magazine ads that featured a huge red headline of the word sex, with the subhead, "Now that I've got your attention ..." The ad would go on to sell some product totally unrelated to the headline. Similarly, many people use names of celebrities (Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, for example) in their ads to grab attention. Don't try that with AdWords. In cyberspace, folks are serious about their searches. If they feel misled by your ad, they'll cost you a click and never visit you again. For example:
Free Britney Spears Pics Hundreds of exclusive photos and videos - all completely free! www.BootzRus.com/BritneyGoesWild
If your site actually sells custom inserts for cowboy boots, this ad will almost certainly achieve a higher CTR (click through rate) than the more traditional ad that follows:
Custom Cowboy Boot Inserts Instant relief of bunions and corns Cures athlete's foot - free shipping. www.BootzRus.com/CowboyBootInserts
But how qualified is the traffic from the first ad? Aside from their anger at being duped when they arrive at a site featuring cowboys with corns and not the celebrity gossip or racy pictures they expected, how likely would they have been to want boot inserts in the first place?
The Britney mistake doesn't usually look that stark and ridiculous, but I see it all the time in my clients' campaigns. Big promises are great, but when they're too vague, they attract the wrong people. For example, NovaMind.com sells mind mapping software to help writers and others brainstorm creatively and efficiently. Here's an ad I made up that would probably beat all their other ads' CTRs, but wouldn't lead to many sales:
Be More Creative Amazing Technique Helps You Brainstorm Brilliant Ideas www.NovaMind.com
This ad promises a big benefit — one that the software theoretically can deliver on — but doesn't qualify the benefit with any information that would allow someone to say, "Oh, that's not for me."
Here's one of their real ads:
Mind Map Software Organize your Creative Thoughts and Mind. Download a Free Trial now! www.NovaMind.com
The headline states what the product is and by implication disqualifies people who don't own, like, or use computers. The free trial offer is appealing, but suggests that the product itself isn't free. Free is a powerful word and must be used cautiously in AdWords. People who have no desire to pay for something will still take one if it's free. If the ad had promised a free download without qualifying it as a trial, they would have increased CTR at the expense of the traffic quality.
Think of your ad like a personals ad. If you're putting personals ads in local papers or Match.com, your goal isn't to attract every bozo in the county. Instead, you want to weed out the incompatibles and make every date a potential winner. Personals ads achieve this qualification by stating who should not apply:
Divorced White Male, 53, in good health, seeks Single White Female, non-smoker, under 45; no cats or whistling cockroaches; must not be allergic to peanuts or mangos; must like Berlioz, Bartok, and organic kohlrabi.
Negative qualifiers not only weed out the wrong folks; they also attract the right folks: ("He's right — I could never live with a whistling cockroach. We're a lot alike. I wonder what he looks like....")
Your ad can qualify based on location (Roslindale IT Consultant), price (Downloadable Book — $17.77), limited options (Red and Gold Only), platform (Not Mac-Compatible), profession (For Teachers), personality (No Whiners!), and many other characteristics. Brainstorm a list of qualifiers by answering the question, "Who shouldn't buy from me?" If you sell a standalone version and a prospect is searching for an enterprise edition, don't even waste a nickel of your cash or a minute of their time. If your negative keywords didn't turn them away (see Chapter 5), let your ad do it before they cost you money.
Every ad has to choose between Mistake #1 and Mistake #2. Mistake #1 is the false positive: Someone clicks who isn't your customer. You've just wasted the click price. Mistake #2 is the false negative: You send away someone who would have bought from you.
Which mistake is worse depends on how much each mistake costs you and how often it occurs. If your clicks cost 5 cents and your average sale is $800, you can afford a lot of false positives (800 × 20 = 16,000 to be exact) for each sale. On the other hand, if clicks cost $32 each, your campaign will hemorrhage cash if you aren't very particular about whom, exactly, you invite to your site.
The third goal of your ad is to manage expectations. If your ad conveys playfulness, don't send your visitor to a dry and hyper-professional-looking landing page. If you advertise a free download, make it easy to find that download. If you highlight a benefit, focus the landing page on that benefit. Show your prospect that you keep your promises, even the little ones you make in your ads. Think of the ad as the headline of your landing page — make sure it signals the precise benefit someone will get when she clicks through to your site.
Imagine that your goal is to sell a photocopier to Al Schmendrick, a local business owner. Which ad headline has the best chance of success?
Big Sale on Business Machines This Week
Are You Tired of Clearing Paper Jams from Your Old Copier?
Hey, Al Schmendrick: Are You Tired of Clearing Paper Jams from Your Old Copier?
If my kids' college tuition depended on the sale, I'd choose headline C in a heartbeat. Why? It's all about the prospect, and it's very likely to get his attention. In fact, if Al Schmendrick doesn't read the paper that day or skips the page that contains my ad, I'd bet that one of Al's friends will tell him about it.
The meta-message of your ad to your best prospect is, "This ad is all about you." Marketing consultant Dan Kennedy talks about the message-to-market match. The keyword defines the market — who they are and what they want. Your ad is the message that must address their self-identity and desires. As I talk about in Chapter 5, the tighter your ad groups, the more precisely your tone, message, and offer can match what each market will respond to.
AdWords is arguably the most competitive advertising real estate on earth. Where else can you find dozens of competitors crammed sardine-like into the same space, vying for eyeballs and actions? If you said "the Yellow Pages," you're almost right. AdWords functions like the Yellow Pages, except in four important respects that make AdWords far more competitive:
In the Yellow Pages, customers might find your ad on the third page of listings, but it could be the very first ad they see. Position is less important than size and look. An AdWords ad on page 8 is essentially invisible.
The Yellow Pages separates the free and paid listings into white and yellow pages. Google shows both on the same page. I've heard from AdWords clients who also have first-page organic rankings who tell me that their organic listing generates three times as many clicks as their ad.
Because AdWords is a results-accountable medium (meaning, you can tell when your ad works and when it doesn't), many AdWords competitors have become proficient through trial and error. Most Yellow Pages ads are just plain awful because businesses haven't discovered the direct-marketing principles that allow for continuous improvement. (For more on this, visit my Web site
www.leadsintogold.com.)In the Yellow Pages, you don't pay less or move to a better position if your ad is more effective than a competitor's. The Yellow Pages is like golf: Your score doesn't directly affect your competitor's score. AdWords rewards relevance with lower prices and higher position, making it more like tennis.
Note
The most important rule when trying to stand out in a crowd is, "When they zig, you zag." As you compose your ad, keep your prospect's big question in mind: "Why should I click your ad instead of all the other ads and organic listings on this page, instead of typing a different search term — and instead of blowing off this search entirely and logging on to Facebook for three hours?"
Search for your top 5–10 keywords and print the results pages. Study these sheets — they may represent hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars of market research and testing. Get a notebook and jot down your observations about each of the ads:
Different isn't enough — your ad must be better. Your goal is to write an ad that sets you apart from the other ads in a way that connects you with your market. For example, say you sell industrial fans. You check out the AdWords competition and discover that the keyword industrial fan brings up ads that focus on models, features, and price. You can differentiate your company by writing an ad citing benefits and ROI.
You can position your offer as unique in many ways. Your market research (detailed in Chapter 4) can give you ideas about what your market wants and what the competition is currently providing and talking about. Now you can write ads that address unmet needs.
When most businesspeople think of competition, they think first of price. If you can produce your goods and services more efficiently than others, you can compete on price. After all, Wal-Mart does it. But being the cheapest isn't usually the most compelling sales argument. Do you want the cheapest flooring in your living room? Do you want to drive the cheapest car? Do you want the cheapest heart surgeon operating on you? Besides, price wars often end up as a damaging race to the bottom for all involved, including the customer who finds that the business can't deliver quality at the price quoted.
If a segment of your market is searching for a particular model, like the Lifeline USA Power Wheel or the Canon PowerShot SX10IS, they may have decided on that particular model already and are now comparison-shopping for the best deal. In that case, an ad that mentions price can be effective.
One way to position your ad is to slice the niche differently.
For example, if you sell martial arts training videos, books, and equipment, you might assume that the entire world of martial arts students and enthusiasts is your market. If you claim a slice of that market and speak to them specifically — for example, college-age women, senior citizens, bouncers — you can position yourself as their supplier of choice. Each of those niches might be small, but you can own them all if they self-identify with their keywords.
The second way to position your ad is to make a better first offer.
Even though the goal of the ad is to make a first sale, you can offer other things that your prospects may want or need before they buy. Reviews, free samples (physical, informational, or software), advice, video demonstration, discussion, and so on can be dangled in front of prospects who haven't yet made up their minds. As long as the "magnet" attracts your prospects and leaves nonprospects cold, you can generate the right clicks by offering an intermediate step of value.
No matter what you sell, you can always position yourself as an expert in the field. Search, by definition, implies some gap between your customers' desires and the information they have about how to fulfill those desires. If your ad offers to guide and educate, rather than simply to sell, your offer can stand out.
Everyone makes decisions rationally, right? People weigh the pros and cons, consider their values and priorities, and maximize benefits while minimizing costs. People balance risks and rewards, and get better over time as they learn from their experiences.
That doesn't sound like anybody I know.
The truth is, all people make decisions emotionally, in their guts. They justify those decisions using logic, but the part of the brain that can handle matrices and cost-benefit analyses is just slower than the part that acts out of fear and greed. Before they consciously ponder, that old reptile brain decides instantly whether someone is friend or foe, prey or predator.
The AdWords ad heightens the emotional aspect of decision making because the rational brain has very little to go on: three lines of text and a Web address. Marketing consultant David Bullock, of www.davidbullock.com, puts it this way:
How do you connect to the "right" click?
One second is all that you have to get the attention of your online visitor. That's it.
The fastest way to meet your revenue goal is to figure out what to say, write, or display in this little 1-inch space to get, hold, and motivate the viewer to click your AdWords ad.
Simply, the idea is to develop a stunning emotional appeal that gets the "right" click.
By definition, emotional appeal is the mental state that arises spontaneously rather than through conscious effort and is often accompanied by physiological changes; a feeling: the emotions of joy, sorrow, reverence, hate, and love.
As you boil it down, most of the decisions people make are based on fear and desire. All emotional states arise from one of these two states. We are either moving toward something or away from some situation.
Your ad has to hit the visitor/searcher right between the eyes, make an instantaneous connection and move the visitor to spontaneously gravitate towards your offer. It is not a matter of logic. Your visitor has no time to think about not clicking your AdWords ad. Your goal is to get them to your landing page and move forward in your customer-acquisition process.
Either you hit the mark or you are off. You either get the click or you don't. Period. End of story.
Your four lines must focus on emotions first and logic second. Your prospect will use logic to construct a search strategy (choosing keywords, searching for information, refining the search to longer and most specific keywords, and so on), but moves toward and away from search results and Web sites based on a subconscious emotional response.
To write effective ads, you have to understand the conversation that just took place inside the head of your prospect as he typed the keyword that brought him ad to them. What is his story? What is he telling himself about his situation and how to improve it?
And I mean story quite literally. Go check out a book of fairy tales, or rent a couple of Disney movies to remind yourself what a story contains: a hero (that's them), a problem, a trigger to action, obstacles and villains, and a happy ending. If your ad can connect to the right place in their story, you can grab their attention and lead them the rest of the way.
Figure 6-1 shows the top ten ads for the keyword home based business. Which ads plug into compelling stories?
Home-based business offers tap into the business opportunity market, which is actually several different markets, each with its own set of motivations and internal stories. Examine the first four ads to identify what they're up to:
Home Business: A no-nonsense ad that uses words like legitimate and serious to emphasize the soberness of this opportunity. The syntax implies that the entrepreneur in question is already doing this, making it by definition do-able. The ad connects with the prospect whose story is, "I don't believe in something for nothing. If I want to be successful, I have to be willing to work for it. (But not too hard, I hope.)"
I Was Scammed 37 Times: This ad allows the reader to bond with Danny over his misfortunes, and to feel superior to him even as they take his advice. The word scammed appears three times, tying into the cynicism of the serial opportunity seeker who too has felt scammed yet keeps hoping that the perfect business opportunity is just around the corner. The word absolute is a powerful emotional trigger, making the tone one of righteous indignation. Prospects who subconsciously want a protector will be drawn to this ad.
Home Based Business — Free: The emotionally laden phrase in this ad is, "You won't get rich." The word realistic and the modest income claims support the notion that this opportunity, unlike others, is achievably modest. It's designed to give hope to those who have been burned or turned off by big promises. This ad connects with the story, "If something's too good to be true, it probably is." The URL reflects the theme of realistic expectations by calling it a project and promising a payday rather than a windfall.
Don't Lose $49 Bucks: This ad is similar to the second one, but speaks directly to the prospect's fear of loss by concretizing and quantifying the risk. Even without knowing how they might lose this $49, the prospect for this ad is suspicious enough to want to find out. The ad appeals to "cautious risk-takers" who believe that having inside information can make them safe. Their story goes like this: "The world is a dangerous place for suckers, but I will be rewarded for my educated boldness."
The two ads at the bottom of the right column (Home Income Opportunity and Your Passport to Wealth?) are interesting because of their choices of emotionally laden words. CEO implies power and status, and speaks to a frustrated employee of a large company who envies and probably resents the CEO. The word passport attracts prospects who view exotic travel as market of success. They crave movement and excitement over security.
An old marketing acronym, AIDA, names the four states that have to occur, in order, in your prospect before you can make a sale:
Attention: Attention is compelled by a headline that names the prospects or their pain, or connects with one of the big three motivators: greed, fear, or curiosity.
Interest: Interest is raised by naming features and benefits (price, free shipping, options, works in zero gravity, you know the drill).
Desire: The desire is the happy ending, or a promised step in that direction. (They can't slay the dragon until they find the enchanted sword.)
Action: The action is the click, to go from the Google results page to your landing page.
All this highfalutin' theory is great, but time to get down to business. You have four lines to accomplish these marketing tasks. The following sections break down the task of each line so you can begin to create magnetic ads.
The goal of the headline is to get your prospects' attention while leaving everyone else unimpressed. Classic headline gambits include the following:
Name Them:
Considering a Unicycle
Mind Maps for Teachers
Actor's Disability Insur.
Mirror Their Itch:
Suffering from Gout?
Rotten-Egg Water Odors?
Disorganized?
Pick Their Scab with a Provocative Question:
Suffering IBS for Years?
Do You Hate Filing?
Got a Jerk for a Boss?
Are You Right-Brained?
Are You a Slacker Mom?
Copywriting Secret #19
Warn Them:
I was scammed 37 times
Howie Jacobson Exposed
Biodiesel Scandal
Make a Big Promise:
Write and Publish a Book
The "Beat Gout" Diet
Jump Higher in 14 Days
Offer Unbiased Information:
8 Shower Filters Tested
Flat-Panel TV Reviews
Compare Autoresponders
If you include the keyword in your headline, you can almost always increase your ad CTR. For example, an ad with the headline "Homebrew for Beginners" achieved a 3.88 percent CTR for the keyword [homebrew] but pulled only 1.01 percent for [home brew].
Matching the ad to the exact keyword tells your prospects that you understand them (even if you don't). NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) experts tell you that people build rapport by using the same words as others rather than paraphrasing. Also, Google bolds keywords on its results page. If you search for healthy recipe, you'll see several advertisers who take advantage of this fact, whereas others offer healthy recipes and don't get the benefit of bolding.
If your competitors are all using the keywords in their headlines (or, in the case of keywords of 20–25 characters, as their headlines), you'll want to choose a different strategy to stand out. But it's a rare ad that won't benefit from inclusion of keywords somewhere in the headline, description, or URL.
A swipe file is a collection of successful advertising pieces from which you can draw inspiration. Professional copywriters rarely invent headlines and bullets from thin air; instead, they modify old standards. For example, John Caples famously (among direct marketing geeks, anyway) sold a piano home study course with the headline, "They laughed when I sat down at the piano but when I started to play ...!" Today, copywriters model this formula in selling everything from baking magazines ("They laughed when I got up to bake") to dog training ("They laughed when I issued my $10,000 dog-trainer challenge ...").
Perry Marshall recommends building your own AdWords swipe file quickly and inexpensively by visiting your local library or supermarket and copying the text on the covers of popular magazines. If you prefer to stay at home, go to www.magazines.com to view covers of current issues. Here are some headline formulas from this week's issues of Cosmo, O, Woman's Day, and Vogue, followed in parentheses by possible AdWords adaptations:
19 dresses that show who's boss (7 skateboards that show who's boss)
The season's hottest styles (The season's hottest cameras)
Weird male behavior decoded (Weird dog behavior decoded)
Break your bad food habits (Break your bad skiing habits)
Shhh! We've got a big secret to less stress (Shh! A big packaging secret)
AdWords consultant Joy Milkowski (getmoreaccess) has put together a menu of ad elements you can deploy in your two description lines. She recommends choosing two, plus a call to action. (See the "Sending Out a Call to Action" section for more information.)
Take some time and brainstorm a few elements for your ad for each of the following menu items. Don't worry yet about fitting your copy into the AdWords space restrictions. Just get the concepts first and whittle away the extra words later.
I'm going to find examples of Joy's ad elements in phrases from real ads for a single keyword: data recovery.
Address a Pain Point: If your customers are searching because they want to prevent or alleviate a problem, you can stoke their interest and build rapport by showing them you understand their situation.
Lost data?
No Need to Panic
Offer a Solution: It's a marketing cliché that people buy holes, not drills, yet businesses routinely neglect to advertise the solutions they provide. One way to get at the solution your customers want is to fill in the blanks, "We provide ____________________ to ____________________ and what this means to you is ____________________." What you wrote in the last blank is the solution. The solutions listed as follows are tame. I would enliven them by adding a "what this means to you" phrase (in parentheses following each solution).
Restore Lost or Deleted Data (so you can keep billing your customers)
Fast data recovery for SQL Server (so you can keep your business running)
List Features: If your product or service is significantly different from your competitors' offerings, list the differentiating features. Banks that are open on Sunday and late on weekdays, environmentally friendly dry cleaners, and single-volume print-on-demand presses are all examples of companies seeking an advantage by doing things a little differently.
HD, RAID, Tape, CD/DVD, Memory Card
24/7 Support
On-Site Clean Room
Short Value Proposition: A value proposition is the answer to the question, "What do you do that makes you the best choice for me?" The first example is a no-quibble guarantee, whereas the second sets out a specific performance goal.
No Data, No Cost
We Recover Most Data in 24 Hours
Differentiator: You can compare your business favorably to others, either overtly or by implication. Google generally frowns upon superlatives (best, cheapest, biggest), but usually is okay with qualifiers such as better, cheaper, bigger. Two of the following examples trash the competition by implication: "We actually do it" implies that others don't, whereas "no junk fees" suggests that competitors tack on extra charges to pad their margins.
Others say $379, we actually do it!
Fastest Turnaround Time
No Junk Fees
Price: In a price-sensitive market, you can signal that you're the best deal by naming a specific price, by telling your prospect that you have low prices, or by offering free shipping. For some reason, free shipping is a very popular online feature. People will pay $20 for the product if they can avoid a $7.95 shipping fee (not consciously, but it happens all the time).
Sale/Promotion: Do you have anything free or on sale? Can you offer two for the price of one? What about throwing in a copy of AdWords For Dummies with every purchase? (Just a thought.) Retail stores have attracted customers with sales since Grog drew a crowd by offering a free club with every spear.
Free Evaluation!
Free Consulting
Free Trial
Credentializer: You can mention any awards you've received, well-known clients, certifications, media mentions. For example, when I searched for
diet tips, the phrase "As Seen on Oprah" appeared twice in the first eight sponsored listings.Since 1980
Industry-Leading 90% Success Rate
12 Yrs. Crashed Hard Drive Recovery
Experts on RAID
No one formula for effective ad writing exists, and you have to make sure the elements you combine make sense together and all pull in the same direction. In general, though, you won't go wrong by putting the big benefit on the first line and the differentiating feature on the second line. The second line will also contain the other crucial element of your ad: the call to action.
You usually want your prospects to click your ad. (In some cases, you may prefer that they phone; if so, include your phone number in the ad. Several of the data-recovery ads had phone numbers, probably on the assumption that someone typing data recovery is in a state of near-hysteria and wants to contact a real person ASAP.) Joy Milkowski suggests two tactics to compel the click: Offer something in exchange for action and create a sense of urgency.
When you offer something, use action words. Your prospect is searching with a "gatherer" mentality. Offer something bright and shiny to shift them into "hunter" mode. Active action words include
Get, buy, or purchase
Order, call, or sign up
Try or download
More passive action words help the prospect make a decision:
See, learn, compare, or discover
View, listen, or watch
The following examples are from ads that appeared when I searched for the keyword data recovery. Note how they all begin with action words.
Get a Quote Today
Call 1-800-555-1212 for Free Analysis
Discover reliable data recovery.
View demo — whitepaper
Once you've chosen your approach and selected elements that will compel action from the right prospects, you have to fit that content elegantly into 135 characters. Joy Milkowski calls this step, "Sell to me in ten words or less." Stop thinking sales pitch and start thinking haiku — the Japanese poetic art that paints a compelling mental picture in 17 syllables.
First, forget everything your high-school English teachers taught you about grammar. Your ad must read like a conversation, not an essay. Notice that Joy didn't use the more grammatically correct construction, "Sell to me in ten words or fewer." Write like you talk — or better yet, write like your market talks.
Apple Computer is running very effective ads featuring two actors portraying a Mac and a PC. The Mac actor is a hip young dude, whereas the PC actor is a pocket-protector-wearing nerd who awkwardly stumbles and bumbles through life. If huge multinational companies develop personalities in the minds of consumers, your business too needs a voice. Your ads are the first words in this voice that your prospects will hear.
The best business personalities are slightly exaggerated but basically accurate extensions of the business owner or leader. Start adopting that voice in your ads. An Internet marketer calling himself "The Rich Jerk" used the following ad when the name of another Internet marketer (whose name I've omitted) was typed as a keyword:
I'm Rich. You're Not. How much money did [name] make? Who cares? I make millions. therichjerk.com
This ad works both to attract a certain type of person and to strongly repel everyone else. In some markets (like Internet marketing, for example), your tone can be brash. In others, you must come across as professional and no-nonsense. You can be caring, efficient, funny, angry, matter-of-fact, exasperated, excited, clinical, or poetic. Test different voices to find out which one connects best with your market. But your best voice will most often be your genuine voice — just smoothed and amped a bit to cut through the clutter of Timid Timmies and Me-Too Mollies. Your prospects are looking for authenticity in a world full of fakeness. Connect to them as your unique self and you're already cutting through the clutter.
Almost everything about your business can be copied, except for you. No one else has your thoughts, your experiences, your unique point of view. Most businesspeople hide this aspect of themselves to appear professional. It's possible to do both — be real and be professional. Take advantage of your only true differentiator and be yourself whenever possible.
Tip
AdWords consultant Garrett Todd of www.impresscallers.com cautions against rampant creativity. Extensive testing has shown him that classic direct-marketing approaches outperform offbeat, creative ads. He shared his top two formulas with me:
Garrett reports that the first ad generates an impressive 11.02 percent CTR. Note that his display URL includes a hyphen; he found that separating the two words increased CTR. The www prefix also improved CTR.
Rob Goyette of www.howtomarketbetter.com, another crackerjack AdWords user, found that his most successful problem headline was
Got [problem]?
For example:
Got Gout?
Many advertisers spend dozens of hours brainstorming and agonizing over their headline and two description lines, and never play with their URLs. That's a big mistake; your URL makes up 25 percent of your entire ad and is often the most important line. Your URL is the name of your store; it conveys lots of meta-information about who you are and whom you serve.
For example, I used to funnel some cold calling traffic to Free-Lead-Generation-Course.com, which offered a 7-day e-mail course instead of a sales-letter Web site. My CTR was comparable to ads that sent traffic to LeadsintoGold.com, but the free course generated about half as many sales.
Even if you have one main Web site, you can buy other URLs and use them in your ads. Domain names cost about $8.00 a year these days (I use www.getgoingonline.com).
Glenn Livingston offers the examples shown in Figure 6-2 of huge differences in CTR due solely to changes in the display URL.
The domain suffixes also tell a story. The business-focused .com sometimes can be beaten by the nonprofit .org, and even .org domains can in fact front for-profit businesses. If you offer reviews or comparisons, TheAntiWrinkleInstitute.org may pull better than JanesWrinkleBustingCream.com.
Google doesn't allow you to use more than one domain name per ad group and insists that the domain in the display URL be the same as the domain of the actual landing page, so you can't split-test display URLs to the same extent as the other three visible lines of your ad.
You can use Glenn's clever method of testing URLs as headlines. Say you're curious about which URL will produce better results: RealDogLovers.com or HelpSavetheDogs.com. Test those URLs as headlines: Real Dog Lovers versus Help Save the Dogs. After you have a winner, buy that domain name and use it as the display URL and the domain of your landing page.
Joy Milkowski improved her die-cutting client's CTR by changing the display URL from www.MyClient.com to www.MyClient.com/die-cut. (Her client's URL wasn't actually myclient.com — most successful AdWords advertisers view their ads and keywords as maps to secret fishing holes, kept close to the chest and never shared with potential competitors. And with AdWords' low barrier to entry, pretty much everyone is your potential competitor.)
Note
In the preceding example, /die-cut is a subdirectory, or folder, within the Web site. You can also test subdomains, which look like this:
die-cut.myclient.com
If you're not sure how to create subdomains or subdirectories, ask your Webmaster.
Check out the two ads shown in Figure 6-3. The top ad received 4.64 percent CTR, compared to only 2.22 percent CTR for the second ad. The only difference was the URL.
The top ad included the www and capitalized the first letter of each keyword — and attracted more than twice as many clicks per impression as the lower ad.
I know you bought this book to figure out the basics of AdWords, to get into the game. But if your market is highly competitive, you have to start at the Big Leagues level just to get any impressions on your keywords. If your keywords are expensive, you may need one of more of the following three techniques just to stay solvent while you crack the AdWords code:
The "fake" www domain is easy enough to try, as long as someone else in your market hasn't thought of it already. (Hey, here's an idea: Buy up every copy of this book you can find, just to make sure your competition doesn't know this technique.)
Dynamic keyword insertion is almost a Google secret. For good reason — do it wrong and you're looking at an AdWords bill that could fund a flight to Mars. So read carefully — and don't even consider using it until you've installed and mastered conversion tracking and analytics on your Web site.
Subdomain redirects were pioneered by Perry Marshall, who has many happy clients using it for all their domains. It's a way to test hundreds of URLs without having to buy them. This technique is a little complicated, but worth it in many cases.
You may have noticed the trick that Glenn Livingston of www.ultimateadwordsresearch.com used in creating his winning display URLs earlier in this chapter. He added www- to a popular keyword and showed that to searchers.
This technique works because it tricks the eye into seeing your domain as the main Web site in the category. Someone searching for digital cameras will view www.DigitalCameras.com as the most relevant and authoritative domain to visit. Glenn bought the domain http://www.www-digitalcameras.com and simply omitted the "real" www from the display URL. The searcher sees www-DigitalCameras.com and can easily confuse it for www.DigitalCameras.com.
This technique is a cheap trick, but it's possibly worth the price of several cases of this book.
Do you ever wonder how eBay and Amazon manage to bid on practically every keyword in existence and show those keywords in their ads? They don't have thousands of employees creating millions of different ads. Instead, they use a special format to stick the keyword right into a generic ad, as shown in Figure 6-4. And now you can do it too!
To use dynamic keyword insertion, first make friends with the squiggly brackets. On most keyboards, you can find them by using the Shift key with the square bracket keys, just below the - and = keys near the top right. They look like this:
| { left squiggly bracket |
| } right squiggly bracket |
Dynamic keyword insertion requires two decisions:
How you want to handle capitalization of keywords?
What do you want to appear on-screen in case the keyword is too long to fit into the ad?
Say you sell mobile phone ringtones and you know lots of people are searching by typing their favorite performer, composer, or type of music followed by ringtone. The list of potential keywords could be enormous. Without dynamic keywords insertion, you'd either spend hundreds of hours creating tightly focused ad groups (see Chapter 5), like Mozart ringtone, Beethoven ringtone, Bach ringtone, Beyonce ringtone, and so on or you'd have a few big ad groups with thousands of those keywords and very vague ads with headlines like these:
Classical Music Ringtones
R&B Ringtones
Hip-Hop Ringtones
To use dynamic keyword insertion, create medium-sized ad group buckets:
Classical Music
Pop Music
Country Music
Rap Music
and so on. Put all your classical music terms — Beethoven, Hilary Hahn, violin concerto, Leonard Bernstein, Philharmonic — in the Classical Music ad group. Then create the following headline:
{KeyWord:Classical Music Ringtones}Note
Note that the colon is not followed by a space!
Now if someone searches for one of your keywords, she'll see that keyword in the headline if it contains 25 characters or fewer:
Hilary Hahn RingtonesBach Requiem RingtoneMissa Solemnis ring tone
If the keyword is too long (Alicia de Larrocha Mozart piano sonata in C ringtone), she'll see the default keyword Classical Music Ringtones instead.
To capitalize every word of the keyword, capitalize the K and W in KeyWord:
{KeyWord:Alternate Text}Capitalize just the first word by capitalizing the K only:
{Keyword:Alternate Text}If you want the keyword to appear in all lowercase, don't capitalize any letters:
{keyword:Alternate Text}If her keyword doesn't fit, the alternate text will appear exactly as you've typed it — capitalized or not.
Warning
If you're careless about your keyword list, you could end up spending a lot of money that you won't make back. An extreme example to make the point: Say my friend Battery Bob accidentally includes Paris Hilton in the keyword list for his cell phone battery ad group.
Without dynamic keyword insertion, the worst that happens is a million teenagers looking for gossip or racy photos see and ignore the following ad:
Cell Phone Batteries All Makes and Models Low Prices - Same Day Shipping www.BatteryBob.com
But with dynamic keyword insertion, here's what they might see:
Paris Hilton Videos All Makes and Models Low Prices - Same Day Shipping www.BatteryBob.com
Uh-oh, Battery Bob. You just spent $12,000 on clicks in about six hours, with no sales to show for it. (The real Battery Bob would never make such a mistake, of course.)
Note
You can deploy dynamic keyword insertion not only in the headline and description lines, but also in the display URL for marketing purposes and the destination URL for advanced conversion tracking.
The third "black belt" ad technique gives you a chance to test hundreds of display URLs for the price of one. A subdomain is the part of your URL that can appear before the main domain name. For example, books is the subdomain of this Web site:
http://books.fitfam.com
With a Web service called www.zoneedit.com, you can quickly and easily create new subdomains without needing to know Web design, HTML, server architecture, or how to make vegan oatmeal cookies. (I actually do know how to make delicious vegan oatmeal cookies — send a blank e-mail to [email protected] for the recipe — but I assure you I could still work ZoneEdit.com without this knowledge.)
My wife had a business selling handmade soap featuring different essential oils and other natural ingredients. Her main Web site address was www.comfortsoap.com. Say she wants to test a different domain that works well with various subdomains, www.soapforyourfamily.com:
lavender.SoapForYourFamily.com oatmeal.SoapForYourFamily.com cruelty-free.SoapForYourFamily.com
With ZoneEdit.com, which is free for the first five domains (not subdomains, so their free service may be all you'll ever need), she can create subdomains and then redirect them to specific pages on her www.comfortsoap.com Web site. She can even mask the pages so the subdomain is what appears in the visitor's browser's address and title bars. With this method, she can test different URLs (which is better, Natural.SoapForYourFamily.com or ChemicalFree.SoapForYourFamily.com?). She can also use different display URLs in different ad groups: the lavender group, the Shea-butter group, the neroli group, and so on.
Note
Visit www.askhowie.com/zoneedit for a video tutorial on using www.zoneedit.com for subdomain redirection.
I warn you about some commonly broken rules in the following sections, but you should still take ten minutes to read Google's editorial guidelines at
https://adwords.google.com/select/guidelines.html
Google's rules for punctuation in your AdWords ads are pretty simple:
No more than one exclamation point in your text, and not in the headline.
No repeated punctuation (Tired??!!).
No unnecessary punctuation ($$ instead of money or $#!! standing in for an expletive).
The capitalization rules for AdWords ads are that you can't use excess capitalization such as FREE or SIDE EFFECTS.
However, you can capitalize acronyms (MPH) as well as the first letter of each word in your ad and in your display URL (LeadsIntoGold.com is acceptable; LeadsintoGOLD.com is not).
Google doesn't like ads that look like they were written by toddlers. Make sure all words are spelled correctly. If you don't have an ear for grammar, get someone who does to take a look at your ad. Spell checkers can't pick up mistakes like using than for then or weather for whether.
You can't use copyrighted and trademarked terms in your ads without the permission of the rights holder.
This is a thorny and complicated issue for Google. If you sell one brand of mobile phone, can you compare it to a competing brand in your ad? Can you use copyrighted terms in your URL? The law is still being written on this topic — and lawsuits are mounting between companies claiming copyright infringement and "initial interest confusion." (I can throw these terms around thanks to my work as an expert witness at trial; obviously I'm not a lawyer and you should get competent legal advice before doing anything that may get you in trouble.)
If you say your business is the best, fastest, cheapest, most successful, and such, you need to prove it to Google (and the world) on your landing page.
If you offer it in your ad, your visitor must be able to get it easily from your landing page. Giving away a free trial download? Put the link in an obvious place on the landing page. If Google's editors visit your site and decide your offer is fraudulent, your ad will be disallowed.
Unlike the late George Carlin, I can't tell you the seven words you're not allowed to use on Google. But if they get bleeped out of movies on TV, that's a pretty good clue to omit them from your ads.
The domain of your display URL must be the same as that of your Web site. That is, if someone typed your display URL into his browser instead of clicking your ad (thoughtfully saving you money!), he should still get to the same Web site, if not the exact same landing page.
Your destination URL must work properly and must resolve to a working Web page, as opposed to an e-mail address or document or multimedia file.
Google is constantly exploring new places and media for their ads. You can now create graphical ads for Web sites, text ads for mobile phones, local business listings that appear on search results pages and next to Google Maps, and video ads.
Image ads are graphical files that display on content sites, but not on Google's or its search partners' results pages. Publishers can choose to display image ads instead of text ads. Perry Marshall has found that image ads typically generate higher CTRs than text ads, but convert to leads and sales at a much lower level. If you're a Web site publisher who gets paid for clicks on the Google ads on your site, image ads can be very profitable because of their high CTRs. For you, the AdWords advertiser, the high CTR can be a double-edged sword. Unless you monitor ROI from each ad, you may be funding Google's expansion at the expense of your own.
If you decide to try display ads, Google provides a Display Ad Builder that allows even those who failed 7th grade art to create decent graphics. You can find it as a link on the ad variations tab at the ad group level of your AdWords campaign management. Go to www.askhowie.com/adwizard for a video tutorial on using the tool.
Joy Milkowski of www.getmoreaccess.com offers the following four suggestions if you decide to try image ads:
Focus on a Pain or Problem
The same principles apply to this format as to all your marketing material — does it clearly suggest/address a pain or problem? Often I see ads trying to "feature dump" instead of offering to solve an issue in simple, easy to read language.
Keep the Design Clean and Simple
Are you trying to be too busy or use colors that are too bold in order to try to get noticed? If yes, chances are you may be turning prospects OFF. Our eyes are drawn to clean, easily decipherable images and language. Image ads, normally, are not the place to go "Las Vegas."
Show People, Not Products
Careful with using pictures of your product on the ad — often the space is so small that you end up either confusing the viewer or making your product seem less than adequate. Instead, I recommend using people. Get the viewer looking at a person — it's hard to NOT notice a person looking right at you!
Include an Offer and a Call to Action
Your image ad needs an irresistible offer as well as a compelling call to action. Remember, you're still in a direct response world. Don't let your ego look at the pretty pictures and elevate branding above measurable response. Compared to text ads, image ads are more expensive and time-consuming to create, more expensive to display, and take longer to generate results. For these reasons, test your message, tone, offer and call to action with text ads before creating image ads.
Google is going mobile, creating content that can be accessed and acted upon seamlessly from your smart mobile phone (and even from your mobile phone of average intelligence but with a nice smile). If your ad includes a link to a Web site, you have to make sure the site is created in a phone-compatible way. If you just want prospects to pick up the phone and call, or drive over and pay you a visit, create your ad and include an offer and call to action.
To create a mobile text ad, click the Mobile Text Ad link from within the Ad Variations tab of an ad group.
You can view your mobile text ad from your SMS-enabled phone by first registering your phone with Google at http://google.com/mobile. You can do this from your computer or just point your phone's browser to http://mobile.google.com. You can conduct searches and view maps, as well as access several other Google services, such as Gmail and Google News.
If your business caters to a local market, you can still use AdWords to attract clients and customers. For instructions on using regular text ads for geographically limited markets, see Chapter 7. Right now you see how to create a local business ad that will appear as Google Maps business listings as well as other search results.
From within the Ad Variations tab of an ad group, click the Local Business Ads link just above the ad variations. On the next page, enter the business name and address. If you have multiple locations, you have the option to add additional addresses to your ad. If your business is not yet listed in Google's Local Business Center, you'll receive the following error message:
No businesses matched the address you entered.
In that case, visit www.google.com/local/add/login to add your business.
If your business is listed (mine isn't, so I'm going to use the Dogstar Tattoo Co. in Durham, NC as an example in Figure 6-5), you can continue to create your ad.
You can add a business image and even change the icon that appears next to your ad. Figure 6-6 shows what the ad looks like on the Google search page.
When someone searches for your keyword in a local area on Google Maps (http://maps.google.com), your ad may appear on the left, below, or above the business listings. Clicking it brings up the ad (including phone number and image) as a callout from the map location, as shown in Figure 6-7.
Figure 6-5. Creating a local business ad for a business already in Google's Local Business Listings.
To create a video ad that shows on content pages, click In-Line Video Ad from within the Ad Variations tab of an ad group. On the next page, choose an image (Google is very picky about the size of this image, so make sure your graphic designer knows the dimensions Google accepts), enter display and destination URLs, name your ad, and upload your video.
Warning
My 9-minute, 30MB QuickTime video took about 7 minutes to load with a fast cable-modem connection, so have a book handy if you plan on uploading lots of large videos.
Adriel Brunson of www.rfyvideo.com, a video advertising expert of many years, studied and experimented with Google video ads in 2006, and sent me this evaluation:
When Google offered video ads in AdWords, everyone who understood the power of video on the Web cheered. Unfortunately, we may have cheered too soon.
We wanted video ads in AdWords campaigns on Google search pages. What we got were video ads that only played on AdSense sites that allow graphical ads. Nothing for regular Google search pages. It's not that Google doesn't understand the value of including video in their searches. For a while, they included Video as one of the five links at the top of their search page. Now it's been moved down to the top of the More ... link.
And videos have been included in the organic search results just like images. This makes it even more important to learn how to include keywords, titles, and other metadata with your online videos.
Google owns
YouTube.comand all videos uploaded there are indexed fairly quickly.YouTube.comnow accepts HD videos, so quality of online video is more than acceptable. Plus,YouTube.comoffers decent capability for metadata including the ability to add your narration as closed captions. That means the text of your video becomes searchable.But, sad to say, Google's AdWords still treats video like an image ad only. If an AdSense publisher allows image ads, you may be able to get your video ad on their site. It's been my experience that few AdSense publishers allow graphical ads. Most choose the default text-only option. Even the AdSense experts recommend text-only ads to blend in with the site navigation and content. No graphical ads, no video.
On the plus side, Google's AdWords video program does offer powerful options. You can create both keyword and site-targeted campaigns. You can search for AdSense sites matching your keywords. If you find any that allow graphical AdSense ads, you can target those sites.
You may want to explore Google's options for playing ads on cable channels in your area. The technical specs are different than online videos but it may be just the right way to use video to get your message to your market.
My recommendation is to create regular AdWords campaigns and drive traffic to a page with a good headline, embed a good video uploaded to
YouTube.comwith metadata included, and complete the page with well-written sales copy and offer.With a regular Google AdWords keyword-targeted campaign, you'll get more control over the traffic, plus you can test everything in the chain — the keywords, the ad, the headline, the video placement, the text and links around the video. You can even test different video edits if you want.
With Google AdWords video ads, you have little or no control over these elements. Go with an AdWords text campaign and a split testing landing page with good video. It's a much better option all the way around.
Because Google runs a blind advertising network based on keyword search (meaning you as an advertiser can't tell in advance where your ads will show, and the publishers can't predict accurately which ads will display on their pages), I recommend using Google video — if you must — only in placement-targeted campaigns (more on this approach in Chapter 7).