Learn one small tweak that boosted CTR by 100%

This 2 minute tweak could dra­mat­i­cally improve your CTR!

When you place an ad on AdWords, what you’re actu­ally doing is shar­ing the first few sen­tences of Your Story with the cus­tomer. Your ad is the very first impres­sion they’ll have of you, mean­ing it deter­mines the tone with which your rela­tion­ship will con­tinue. And as they say, “You don’t get a sec­ond chance at a first impression.”

With this in mind, you may wish to write ad copy that doesn’t zoom right to the end of your product’s story (the results), but instead implies a set­ting from which the cus­tomer can fill in the details of the results.

Look at what we tried:

As you can see, the win­ning ad had a 100% boost over the los­ing add, just from chang­ing “Turbo Charge” to “Trans­form.” Our cus­tomer base was not respon­sive to us telling them how the prod­uct would change their life. “Turbo Charge” is some heavy ver­biage and it obvi­ously didn’t res­onate well with our audi­ence. So, instead, “Trans­form” con­veys the mean­ing of change, yet doesn’t dic­tate exactly what change will hap­pen to the user. This let’s each per­son fin­ish the story of using your prod­uct based on their spe­cific desires.

When you are writ­ing your ads, do you con­clude everyone’s story for them, or do you let each cus­tomer tai­lor the end­ing to their own needs and wants?

This is just one exper­i­ment to try dur­ing your ad tweaks. Here’s a guide for learn­ing the process that lead us to try this.

Last 5 posts by

• Do you think SEO in other lan­guages is eas­ier? — Sep­tem­ber 18th, 2008
• Google Slap — How to recover from a Google Slap? — Sep­tem­ber 8th, 2008
• What Does Your Order But­ton Say? — August 29th, 2008
• Will Knol Rule The Search Engines? First Analy­sis Indicates…It Just Might — July 23rd, 2008
• Are small busi­nesses drop­ping out of AdWords? — July 23rd, 2008

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

If you want to see what's in the private lab...

Ask yourself... which part of your business would you most like to improve?

I can send you 7 tactics related to your specific needs, if you like.

You don't have to buy anything, just take it as a backstage pass into our private course.

Will it give you the solution you've been waiting for?

There's only one way to find out.