How Tiny, Little Changes To Your AdWords Ads Can Boost Your Click Through- And Conversion Rates By 42% And More
Lets be honest, testing and tracking isn’t really the most exciting part of online marketing, however its absolutely crucial. Actually, a good testing and tracking strategy can make the difference between dominating a market and going bankrupt.
Testing new things doesn’t necessarily require a huge amount of creativity, time and effort. In fact, it’s often the simple things that can lead to the most amazing results. It’s the kind of things of which you might be tempted think that they aren’t even worth giving a try, because they won’t make any difference anyway.
Here are a few ideas of simple things you can test for your PPC ads, for your landing pages, sales pages…
- Use capital letters for the first letter of a word
- Use lower case for the first letter of certain words, like to, for, and, of…
- Put a dot, a question mark or an exclamation mark somewhere in your phrase
- Replace the word “fast” with “easy”; “quick” with “simple”… you get the idea.
- Replace certain words with a synonym.
That’s all simple stuff that can be implemented with a minimum amount of effort – you can even do this 5 minutes before going to bed when you are already half asleep.
Now you might think: “What’s the point of making these ridiculous changes – they surely won’t be able to increase my conversion- or click through rates”
But I tell you, it very well can! This actually could have a huge effect. I’m not saying, this will work for each and every little change you make, but it will work for quite a few of them. And believe me, in the long run this will make a huge difference to your bottom line.
Here is a very interesting example that shows what a tiny, little change in a Google AdWords ad can do:
AdWords Ad #1:
Spiritual Healing Guide
Learn To Control Your Mind, Body &
Intuition Through Spiritual Healing
CTR: 1.13% ; Conversion Rate: 16.4%
AdWords Ad #2:
Spiritual Healing Guide
Learn to Control Your Mind, Body &
Intuition Through Spiritual Healing
CTR: 1.61% ; Conversion Rate: 18%
Ad#2 shows a staggering 42% increase in CTR and a 12.5% increase in its Conversion Rate over Ad#1!
But, what’s the difference between these 2 ads? The “to” (in Learn to Control Your Mind…) in Ad#1 uses the letter “T” in uppercase, whereas Ad#2 uses a lowercase letter “t”. That’s all! A tiny little change that causes a huge effect.
Amazing isn’t it? I got this one from Roger Hall’s book 37 AdWords Secrets. And by the way, if you are already a somewhat advanced AdWords marketer I highly recommend you get a copy of this book – there is tons of great stuff in it.
It’s really simple:
- For each adgroup, always use 2 different ads that are split-tested (equally rotated) against each other.
- Once a day, or every few days, check the stats in your AdWords account.
- Before changing any ads, make sure you have enough clicks (at least 30-40) so that the result is statistically relevant.
- Make a tiny change to the losing ad and try to beat the control.
Again, making these little changes takes only a few minutes a day, but in the long run it makes all the difference. These simple things allow you to increase your click through rates, to generate more traffic, to get cheaper traffic and to convert more visitors into leads and sales, with only a minimum amount of time and effort.
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Did the stats get mixed up?
Yes, indeed – I mixed up the stats between ad1 and ad2
Thanks a lot for pointing it out Ellyn
Would be interesting to see the click volumes for each ad also.