In early November, my client received some Holiday optimization advice from Google via a four page presentation. In the presentation, Google provided Adwords™ ad text suggestions:
The first suggestion is shown below:
To be blunt, we would never recommend this ad text. Despite Google’s suggestions, the Google search algorithm will actually punish you via a higher cost-per-click when running this ad. The problem is that the complete first line of Ad Text – ‘The Perfect Gift For Your Little’ has no relevance to the keywords ‘Kids Snowboards’. Although Google does not explicitly describe this, our mathematical models have consistently shown that this lack of relevance will increase your costs-per-click, lower your average position and hurt your conversion rate.
The Ad Text’s second problem is providing useless information. If a retailer is selling a known product, they should not spend precious ad-text calling the product ‘The Perfect Gift’. It doesn’t take a statistician to know that people searching for ‘kids snowboards’ in early December are aware of the gift angle. A much improved ad would provide the brands available, the price range, or the sizes in stock.
The third problem is simple the wasted word ‘Holiday’ within ‘Free Holiday Shipping’. We call words like this in Ad Text filler words that we attribute to lazy digital marketing. Remember, you have only 2 lines of ad text with 35 characters on each line – treat each character as precious.
To be fair, Google included some good (if perhaps obvious) advice such as:
- Check Inventory to Coverage (i.e. don’t advertise stuff you don’t have)
- Monitor Campaigns Closely
- Lower Bids after Ship by Christmas date has passed
One critical insight from our paid search statistics is that Ad Text makes a big difference. Following Ad Text advice coming from blast e-mails or guessing at Ad Copy will lower your returns on your paid search spend. If you are interested in taking a scientific approach to optimize your paid search campaigns, please contact Anova Group.
Posted by Jeff Aliotta
