Like many people who run
a business via the Internet, I use
affiliate programs to supplement my
income.
One of the affiliate products I use
myself and love to promote - Proposal Kit - had been
performing particularly well for me recently and I
decided to help things along by creating a Google
AdWords campaign based around my reviews of the product.
After one month, the campaign was going
ok, I was getting a few sales here and there and
certainly making a good ROI on the promotion. However,
although my Click Through Rate (CTR) was pretty good
(1.2%), it was starting to slide backwards and I thought
I could do better.
As you probably know, your ad position in
Google relies heavily on your CTR compared to that of
your competitors, so I was keen to turn things around
and keep my high ad positions.
Around this time, I bought Nick Usborne's
book Net Words and started to read it, taking notes as I
went. I realized that according to Nick's philosophy, my
AdWords ads were flat and boring. They were just not
appealing enough to entice people to click on them.
As Nick explains in his book, "Being blah
guarantees you'll never be heard".
So I set about re-writing some of my ad
text to speak more directly to my audience and ask them
a question that required a response. Below is an example
of an ad targeting the search query business proposal
before I changed the text:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Business Proposal Kit
Close the sale with a professional
business proposal template kit.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
And here is the text I replaced it with:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Need a business proposal?
Create your own professional
proposal with our template kit.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The aim was to get my average CTR for the
entire campaign up to around 2% from the existing 1.2%
it was sitting at. I logged off for the evening and went
to bed, not expecting too much. The next morning, I had
messages in my email in-box advising me that I had made
3 sales overnight! I was quite excited and logged into
AdWords to see how things were going.
Sure enough, my clicks were way up and
two of the three AdGroups I had edited were showing an
average 33% CTR! My overall campaign CTR had risen from
1.2% to 2.4%. I had never experienced CTR that high
before. The ad I had changed used to show a 2.5% CTR and
after a few days the replacement ad displayed a 4.3%
CTR.
More motivated now, I studied the ads
that had attracted the most clicks and created more ads
around related keywords and phrases, using similar
headlines to the ads that were performing the best. This
time, I incorporated Nick's advice to use short and
punchy copy.
Below is an example of an ad I was using
to target the search query seo contract before I changed
the text:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sample SEO contract
Proposal Kit provides a perfect SEO
contract template. Read our review.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
And here is the text I replaced it with:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Need an SEO contract?
Create yours.
Today.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
After another week, my average CTR for
the whole campaign jumped from 2.4% to 4% and I had a
couple of ads showing 100% CTR! You can imagine how
excited I was. Of course the high CTR builds on itself
because the higher your CTR, the higher your ad position
and the higher your ad position, the more clicks it is
likely to attract.
So my campaign had jumped from 1.3% in
the first month, to 2.4% in the second month and after
my fine-tuning, it's now showing a 4% CTR consistently.
And the sales? Well I now average between seven and ten
sales per week, up from two per week over the past six
months and my affiliate commission is at an all time
record.
The exercise just goes to show that a few
thoughtful tweaks to your ad copy can make a HUGE
difference to your bottom line. So what are you waiting
for? Go tweak that copy in your own PPC campaigns...
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
As well as running her own
SEO business, Kalena Jordan manages and tutors at
Search
Engine College, an online training institution
offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable
self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and
Search Engine Marketing subjects.
