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Google AdWords Tips: The Power of The “Secret” Keyword

May 11th, 2007 by Mike Reining Read more about Google AdWords Tips

Did You Know That One Secret Key­word Alone Could Dou­ble the Con­ver­sion Rate of Your Site?

Try test­ing the “secret” key­word in your Google AdWords Ads

Today I am going to share a secret with you that will sur­prise you.  This time I added just one key­word “Secrets” into the head­line of our Google AdWords ads. 

The result?  Take a look

The only change was that we added the key­word “Secrets” to the head­line of one of the ads. 

What did I expect?  Truth be told, I have long known that “Secrets” is one of those power key­words.  Every­one wants to know what The Secrets of X are (just think of the movie The Secret).  How­ever, I also think that it is incred­i­bly overused but as long as it works, I am happy to keep try­ing it.

In this case, I thought it might help boost the CTR but in fact what hap­pened is that the CTR was about the same but we saw a HUGE jump in the con­ver­sion rate.  About 3 times (+200%) as many peo­ple took advan­tage of the offer.  

I am often amazed at how often I observe that even though there is no notice­able change in the CTR there still can be a huge dif­fer­ence in the con­ver­sion rate.  I am sur­prised because by the time peo­ple take action on the site, I thought they would have long for­got­ten about the ad that they read and they prob­a­bly have.  How­ever, it does seem to make a last­ing impact.  Once again, it shows you why mon­i­tor­ing the con­ver­sion rate and test­ing every­thing is so important.

Con­tinue learning:

Google AdWords Expert — Interview

Pay Per Click Make Money

AdWords Sys­tem Exposed

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About the Author

Mike Reining 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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2 Responses to “Google AdWords Tips: The Power of The “Secret” Keyword”

  1. wesley

    I would much rather see the dif­fer­ence between “Online mar­ket­ing tac­tics” and “Online mar­ket­ing secrets”. It just seems to me that “Online mar­ket­ing” in itself is miss­ing some­thing, anything.

  2. Deepali

    This is very inter­st­ing. I have never tried the word ‘secret’ in my ads but I think I will if I can.

    I have how ever noticed that some­times when CTRs are the same, the CRs might be quite dif­fer­ent when just one word is added / sub­tracked in the headline.

    I don’t think enough of adver­tis­ers realise the impor­tance of test­ing ad copy, or the while key­word have sea­sonal trends, ad per­for­mance too go through trends at times. My ads are always set on ‘rotate evenly’, because some­times ads with good CTR actu­ally con­vert badly as com­pared to ads with lower CTR.

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