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 is a 4-part series so stay tuned over the next 4 days to get the whole lesson.

Attracting Buyers (Part 1/4)

Initially, when an advertiser is beginning to write his own ads, he might have a narrower focus for their objective. “How do I attract visitors?”, or “How do I get a higher click-thru ratio?” are usually the first instinctual questions he’ll ask himself. If not aware of these next 2 goals, the purpose of attracting buyers is most certain to be fruitless and unrewarding. This is the part of ad writing that gets you higher CTRs. The better you qualify website visitors, the lower your CTR will be.

Write Catchy Ads. Well that was easy. Duh. Of course we want to write catchy ads but how do we write the catchiest ads? Try not to pressure yourself too much. We won’t really know which ads are the most attractive unless we test multiple ones at the same time. I’ll talk more about testing at the end of this article (Part 4/4) but for now, I want to give some key advice which will make the ads catchier. Look at this sample ad about coffee beans.

In the ad description, you will see the offer for “20% Off.” Description lines are where we should include special offers, unique selling points, key features, and supporting description if the ad title is vague in any way, and a call-to-action. Google recommends having the special offers on Line 1 along with features and descriptions etc. and a call-to-action on Line 2.

Studies have been done that show people are highly attracted to numbers (percentages and dollar amounts). When inquiring buyers perform a search, they will get a list of results and then scan the page for information. Typically they are scanning for relevancy (mentioned next) and incentive. Numbers often times imply incentive and if we use them, wandering eyes will be more likely to stray in your direction.

Unique selling points like Free Fast Shipping are always going to grab more attention when product shipping cost might be high or when buyers might be eager to receive their shipment. A good call-to-action like “Order Online!” following the free shipping part will make the buying process seem most effortless and fast.

Relate the Ads to the Buyer. This is actually more responsible for making ads catchy because the relevance takes place most effectively in the ad title. I separated this part out from the previous section because it requires a whole separate set of actions that must be done outside the scope of simply writing the ads.

First, in order to relate ads to the buyers, we have to know what they want. Luckily, we kind of know because they type in these little things called keywords which tell me exactly what they desire. Now that we know what they are looking for, it makes a lot of sense to simply put an ad in front of them that matches this desire. It’s easy, right? Depends…

Too many times I have visited a new Adwords advertiser account and inside the Adgroups I notice that there are all types of different keywords which really have no textual relation to one another. For instance, in an Adgroup that uses the mentioned sample ad, I might see these keywords: Dark Coffee, Coffee Gift Basket, Costa Rican Coffee, and Dark Ground Coffee. These keywords might seem highly relevant to each other as they have the word “coffee” but they don’t all do a good job of relating the ad to the buyer. Let’s review.

Dark Coffee - Although extremely general, this keyword is the best suited for this ad title. All the words in the keyword are in the ad and it is still very relevant overall.
Coffee Gift Basket - Way off the mark. I don’t see gift basket here in the ad at all.
Costa Rican Coffee - All this could be somewhat relevant, it is better if we put it in an Adgroup with the title “Costa Rican Coffee”.
Dark Ground Coffee - Totally irrelevant. This ad says “Coffee Beans” and “Whole Bean Purchases.” Why would we put this in front of someone specifically looking for “ground” coffee?

If you happen to find yourself in a situation where you are guilty of compiling all sorts of keywords into one ad, don’t trip out. It’s not the end of the world. All you have to do is make a list with groups of similar sounding and meaning keywords; all of which describe the exact same product. Once you have this list, just make more Adgroups in the same campaign. And make the ad title most relevant to keywords within that Adgroup.

These keywords might be better suited for the above ad: Dark Roast Coffee, Dark Coffee, Dark Roast Beans, Dark Coffee Beans, and Dark Roast Coffee Beans. When these terms prompt the corresponding ad to show on a search, any actual words the ad possesses will bold up and stand out to the person searching.

So imagine you are the person doing the search. You go to Google. You type in Dark Roast Coffee. An ad appears that says ‘Dark Roast Coffee Beans’ as those keywords in the ad bold up. There are other ads that don’t seem as relevant to your search. This one matches your search exactly. Isn’t this where you want to click and possibly buy?

Come back tomorrow to see Qualifying Buyers (Part 2/4).