Posted onJuly 31st, 2009 byadministrator

Qualifying Buyers (Part 2/4)

The second purpose in writing effective ads is to qualify buyers. There are two reasons why you want to qualify your buyers, 1) to make sure they are actually buyers and 2) to make sure they want something you have. Some of the actions you will take in this part may already be done by virtue of taking action to attract your buyers. Nevertheless, it is important that you make a mental note that you have qualified your visitors as your buyers before letting the ads run.

Make sure they are buyers and not just information hungry visitors. (Writing catchy ads can be very similar in task.) As an advertiser, it seems common knowledge that the sponsored links area of a search results page will hold only ads whose sponsor is looking to sell something. In other words, people searching, who are not advertisers, may not know the sponsored links are there for more than information usually. How can we make sure that people clicking on our ads are really out to buy something?

We have already done this if we inserted some “call-to-action” language or description that implies a purchase. In the example ad, there were 4 things that do this; all of which were in the description.

20% Off All Whole Bean Purchases.
Free Fast Shipping, Order Online!

20% Off means off of a price which implies a purchase. The actual word ‘Purchases’ is more littoral than implied. In case you were wondering, it states, “You will be making a purchase.” Shipping information implies purchasing or buying. And the best way to imply a necessity to buy (especially when you have more product description in the ad) is to put in a call-to-action; Order Online, Order Now, Buy Now, etc. Don’t use “click here.” Google does not allow this call-to-action and it doesn’t imply the necessity to buy.

Make sure they are looking for something you can offer.

I hope by this stage in the game, you have been particular enough to only use specific keywords that describe what you do or what you sell. If not, then look up our article on Keyword Research. Assuming all your chosen keywords are relevant to your business offerings, then there are only 2 things left for you to do. Look at Bounce Rate and Search Query.

Go to Analytics Reporting features and have a look at some keyword Bounce Rates. A bounce rate is a percentage of visitors who come to the site and exit from the exact same page they landed on. Usually if we have a high bounce rate, we would assume we are not meeting the buyer’s needs for some reason or another.

I have a client who sells electric scooters for the physically disabled and elderly. Some of the scooters have 3 wheels and some have 4 wheels. One of the client’s adgroups contains keywords “3 wheel scooter” and “electric scooter.” He had a terrible bounce rate in the beginning. Why? He was attracting buyers for children’s scooters and those scooters that actually have 2 wheels, that go very fast and jump off street curbs. You wouldn’t see a disabled person performing that stunt.

His ads were titled 3 Wheel Scooters and Electric Scooters. By simply adding some qualifying language to make them show as 3 Wheel Senior Scooters and Senior Electric Scooters, we were able to lower the bounce rate and increase his conversion rate on those key terms.

Just because you have a high bounce rate doesn’t mean you have unqualified buyers. However, it is worth investigating. Always ask yourself if you are doing a good job attracting the most relevant shoppers. You might also look at your other things like landing page effectiveness, ease in navigation and checkout process, pricing, or other things that could cause increased bounces.

Search Query Reports in the Reports feature of your Adwords account will tell you a lot about what people actually type into Google to find you. If you find a lot of irrelevant variations of your keywords in there; add and test some language in your ad that would qualify irrelevant queries better. You can also add in negative keywords or test match settings on your keywords to see if that helps. We’ll cover Match Settings and Negative Keywords in a different post.

The better you qualify online visitors, the more likely you are to have a low CTR (click-thru rate). This is okay. It is always be better to have a lower CTR than to have a high CTR and pay for unwanted traffic.

Come back tomorrow to see Qualifying Buyers (Part 3/4) and Testing Ads (Part 4/4)

This entry was posted on Friday, July 31st, 2009 at 1:23 pm and is filed under Click Through Rate, Uncategorized, Writing Ads. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.