Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing (for example Google AdWords) can be the perfect complement to your organic SEO efforts. PPC allows you to quickly drive relevant traffic to your website in a very controlled manner, controlling where visitors go and what they see. At the same time your PPC spend can be tightly managed and you can quickly make tweaks to optimise your campaign.

However, unless you operate in a total monopoly, the chances are your ads will be competing with numerous other ads for attention and clicks. So how do you make your ads stand out from the crowd, attract attention, clicks and generate business leads?

The ad is benefit led

Too many AdWords advertisers lead with features rather than benefits in their ad copy. Whilst features are useful, the most successful advertisers lead with benefits first and include features later to support their benefits.

In this example there is a financial benefit (2 for 1 cinema tickets) but the benefit does not have to be financial. Benefits could include comfort, health, time-saving, increases in productivity or anything that could generate an emotional response. Following the benefit, the ad goes on to explain the features which further inform the searcher and act as a qualifier (see below).

They use ratings to stand out and build trust

There are millions of businesses online and probably hundreds or even thousands in your market. Each will claim that their offering is the best. Ratings provide an immediate method of grabbing attention, building trust with the searcher and demonstrate social proof (that your product / service is so good that other people would recommend it).

Visit Google Consumer Surveys to begin collecting ratings for your business that can be used within your ads.

Sitelinks make the ad larger and provide a call to action

The ad above also utilises four sitelinks at the bottom of the ad. Sitelinks are one of the most powerful, yet under-utilised features of Google AdWords. They increase the size of your ad and typically draw more attention than those ads that don’t use sitelinks. Best of all, there’s no additional cost to implement them.

Sitelinks can also be scheduled and are a great way of promoting a special offer, such as a free consultation, a discount or free delivery. They also provide an ideal opportunity to both further convey your offering and insert a call to action (in the example above ‘Start a Car Quote’).

A note on qualifiers

Whilst it is important to increase your click through rate as much as possible, it is more important to ensure that searchers that click through are actually your target market. Don’t be afraid to use qualifying text to discourage clicks from searchers who will never convert.

For example, if you sell in at the higher end of the market, you may wish to include pricing in your ad. Or if you only serve certain demographics make sure that this is conveyed in your ad.

 

By David Rushton, head of digital at Talisman

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