Getting more quality clicks from Google Adwords

Ideas to improve the effectiveness of your AdWords creative

In a traditional advertising sense, your AdWords text is your creative, your broadcast to the world aimed at helping (or is that interrupting) people on their journey as they use Google.

As you'll know, copy in AdWords is so important since it affects several factors that all relate to your return in investment. If you make your ads relevant to the audience searching, it will:

• Boost clickthrough rate giving more visits to your site and better quality score
• Reduce cost-per-click through the way quality score works
• Reduce bounce rate and increase conversion through relevance to the landing page

It's a delicate balance since you want to maximise quality score and minimise cost-per-click through maximising clickthrough rate, but at the same time you don't want to pay for irrelevant clickers. So, to an extent your ad should attract and repel (those not likely to purchase) at the same time!

Ad-text for PPC is a creative art in itself,  with only 25 characters for a headline and 35 for each description line it is easy to see why it infuriates so many when completing the work.

The Good & The Bad...

To highlight some of the Do's and Don'ts for PPC creative, I have take a screenshot which explores the creative utilised in the hyper competitive industry of "laser eye treatment":

Looking down the paid ads, some of the features of Adwords today that we need to include are:

• Use of keyword within title and description
• Utilisation of Ad sitelinks, deep linking to useful resources or lead tools
• Integrated reviews
• Including offers within creative to entice click through is used well in advert 3, utilising 1/2 to save that all important character
• Utilisation of Google Places within advert to allow people to see location of nearest surgery

You can see that most of the adverts down the right hand side are not targeted towards my search query. They don't include the keyword "treatment" which means their clickthrough rates will fall. Weaknesses of these ads includes...

• Adverts targeted at "laser skin treatment" or "Beautiful eye lids" are wasting valuable budget on appearing for irrelevant keywords - this is likely because they haven't created sufficient Ad Groups to target this phrase.
• Leading with your brand at the expense of been relevant
• Generic "laser treatments" copy that is not specific enough to my query to encourage a click

Laser Eye Surgery...

When searching for a closely related keyword, "laser eye surgery" Google has decided to display local results as well. This highlights the importance of Google Places in both paid & natural search, it takes up large portion of the search results page. The businesses for this search query are much more on the ball, 80% are making good use of keywords in headlines and descriptions.

The example below takes full advantage of the features within Google Adwords to create a useful advert, with the location, telephone number, reviews, site links to useful resources and getting across their value proposition "No 1 provider":

Summary - Quick tips for improving AdWords CTR

• Utilise capitals to start each new word
• Include the keyword in headline & description (you will need sufficient AdGroups to do this)
• Integrate reviews into your site
• Utilise sitelinks