MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

There is an old say­ing in online marketing:

“Cus­tomers don’t like to be sold.”

As a result, it is worth test­ing whether and what “ben­e­fit” words will actu­ally ben­e­fit or hurt the per­for­mance of your Google AdWords ads. A sim­ple word such as “eas­ily” might have a sig­nif­i­cant pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive impact on the click-through-rate and ROI of your Google AdWords ads.

Below is a study where we tested adding and leav­ing the key­word “eas­ily” out from our Google AdWords ad. In the exam­ple below, you see that incor­po­rat­ing “eas­ily” into the copy of the Google AdWords ad had a dev­as­tat­ing impact on the results. In other words, the test showed that stick­ing to a plain descrip­tion and not hyp­ing the ad with a word such as “eas­ily” boosted the click-through-rate by 89%.

The above test is already sta­tis­ti­cally valid. In other words, we are 95% con­fi­dent that the win­ning ad will out­per­form the los­ing ad in the long run. As a result, I can con­fi­dently delete the los­ing ad and start a new test. I have to thank the AdWords Opti­mizer from Click­Muse for send­ing me these alerts so that I can tweak and opti­mize my Google Ads in record time.

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• Do you think SEO in other lan­guages is eas­ier? — Sep­tem­ber 18th, 2008
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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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