ppc-management

There’s no doubt that boosting your landing page’s quality score is important. If your click-through rate (CTR) is poor, no prospect will ever see your perfectly optimized web page. In fact, improving your quality score works hand-in-hand with boosting your CTR.

To grab the busy search engine visitor’s attention, writing a compelling ad requires knowledge of your buyer’s desires, presenting an attention-grabbing offer and designing irresistible web copy.

While there is no one-size-fits-all PPC management solution, following these 5 tips can help you increase your CTR, save your marketing dollars, and simplify the add writing process.

Identify Prospect Personas

The web’s free and paid keyword research tools give search marketers an incredible amount of information about your buyer’s spending habits and preferred keywords. Develop a complete buyer persona by examining demographic, location and keyword data, and identifying those prospects who are the most likely to convert.

Marketing Sherpa polled B2B users on the top rated tactics to create a buyer persona.

Most PPC marketers will need several buyer persona to match different buyer groups with their products or services. By dividing your final list of keywords into buckets that target each stage of the buying process, you can identify when the prospect is read to buy–or just wants free information.

Mix Benefits and Features in Your Copy

Most PPC advertising consists of a headline, two lines of copy, a URL and a landing page. Typically, to peak the buyer’s interest, PPC ad writers sprinkle an equal mix of benefits and features into the ad text.

In most sales-oriented ads however, the more benefit-rich details you provide the better the ad. The only way that you can truly know how the buyer responds to your ad is to test different feature/benefit combinations to see which copy performs best.

Test Your Results

A small difference in the wording of your ad can have a big effect on your CTR. To test several ad variations, have three or four writers create one or two versions of a compelling ad.

While you can only run one ad per keyword, you can test each version over a period of a month to measure which ads have the most potential to increase CTR.

Write A Compelling Headline

Similar to the content on your website, your PPC ads need a headline that grabs the reader’s attention quickly and ties into prospect’s buyer psychology. The best web headlines include the following characteristics:

  • Use words that draw attention, such as now, special, free trial, save money and exclusive.
  • Skip any small or non-relevant words that take up ad space.
  • Use search terms in the headline. If your prospect uses a particular keyword phrase to find help solving their problem, use the keyword in the headline and in the body copy. Remember, keywords with three or four phrases are less competitive that one or two-word ones.

Maximize Your Ad Text

Each search engine sets specific line length and rules on the use of punctuation, proper nouns, trademarks and word use. You can boost your ads responsiveness by using these simple ad writing tricks and tips:

  • Search users want to be comforted, excited or entertained. Make sure that your copy fulfills one or two of these emotional needs.
  • Use a full “www” URL prefix in your advertising.
  • Include a strong call-to-action in the text. Common call-to-action phrases include: “order now,” “buy now”, “sign up”, “get a quote” or “start now”.
  • Turn on automatic keyword insertion to allow the search engines to add keywords automatically to your ad as the user enters a closely related keyword phrase.