MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

A few days ago I posted about the impor­tance of hav­ing descrip­tive ad copy to opti­mize your Google AdWords Ads. Today I wanted to show you another case that high­lights just how impor­tant it is to be descrip­tive and NOT salesy.

Few, peo­ple enjoy ads (except for the Super Bowl) and strik­ing the right tone and mes­sag­ing online is very impor­tant. You want to get users to click on your ads but most impor­tantly, you want them to con­tinue and take action. In other words, you want to turn your vis­i­tors into leads.

Just a sin­gle adjec­tive can make or break your Google Ad copy. We tested three options (see the exam­ple below):

1. A salesy adjec­tive (powerful)
2. A descrip­tive adjec­tive (easy)
3. No adjec­tive

It turns out that using a good adjec­tive vs. no adjec­tive greatly boosted the click-through-rate of our ad. How­ever, pick­ing a pow­er­ful adjec­tive (i.e. one that was more salesy) greatly back­fired. It still deliv­ered lots of vis­i­tors but only very few of them con­verted (CR = con­ver­sion rate).

I have pre­vi­ously writ­ten about “Power Words” and how they can some­times have a huge pos­i­tive impact on your Google AdWords ads. This is true. How­ever, it is impor­tant to stay clear of words that will deliver only clicks and not leads and any­time you use mar­ket­ing copy to trig­ger an auto­matic response from vis­i­tors it is very impor­tant to check that these extra vis­i­tors are worth the cost of the clicks.

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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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