You’ve been testing new adverts for years, making ever-smaller refinements as you close in on that holy grail, the ‘perfect advert’. Suddenly, and without warning, your clickthrough rate crashes. You try tweaking various aspects of your adverts, rolling back to your last few versions, but nothing helps. Your advert is officially pants.
What happened? Where did it all go wrong? What do you tell your line manager/client?
Adverts don’t exist in a vacuum. Whenever your advert is displayed, it’s being placed amongst a number of other adverts, generally for the same product or service. It’s easy to think that the clickthrough rate of your advert is simply a function of its position, and the advert text. But unless you look at it in the context of the adverts around it, you’ll have no way to tell whether it’s good or not.
Here’s an example. You’re selling the new Apple IWidget for £249, and your advert says:
Advert 1:
Is this a good advert? Or would you be better saying:
Advert 2:
You run an A:B test, and both have a similar conversion rate, but advert A has a clickthrough rate of 5%, compared to just 3% for advert B. This is fine and dandy, until one of your competitors realises that their clickthrough rate has dropped, and spots your advert. They write one saying:
Competitor:
Suddenly, your USP isn’t so compelling – you are more expensive, and are telling the world. Your clickthrough rate drops sharply, and your advert goes from amazing to pants overnight.
Of course, the opposite is also true. You may have tested the two adverts and found that the second one works better, because your price wasn’t competitive. But the moment your competitors stop advertising their price, they open the door for you to do so.
Writing good PPC adverts isn’t just about identifying the right USP, and pushing that. The USP that works best may change, and actively tracking what your competitors are saying (or aren’t saying) can be the difference between having to react when your adverts crash, and dominating the PPC results.
The price-sensitivity above is an obvious example, but there is a small danger. You need to ensure that large changes to your adverts don’t negatively impact the quality of visitor to your website. I said earlier that the conversion rate was the same, but what happens to the average order value? It may make no difference, but it may be very significant. Here’s another example. This time, you’re selling Digital Cameras.
Advert 1:
Advert2:
Suppose that Advert 1 has a better clickthrough rate, and the conversion rate is the same. It’s a no-brainer, right? Clearly, the people that click on the second advert and likely to buy more expensive cameras, so the better advert may well be the second one.
This all sounds fairly unremarkable, but something happened to one of my campaigns a couple of weeks back, and I became interested in this whole question in a hurry.
We were advertising a good price-point, and were mopping up in the market that we were advertising in. A competitor came along, with a lower price-point, and undercut us, taking half of our conversions. But the conversion rate didn’t change, and the value of the conversion went up sharply, since our competitor was taking all the low-value traffic.
To cut a long story short, the campaign became a lot more profitable overnight, because our competitor was taking all the unprofitable traffic. This led to a secondary impact, as the improved average conversion value meant that we could increase our bids, and move up the search results.
We are now getting almost as many conversions as before, but our competitor has made our campaign a lot more profitable, by qualifying our traffic in a way that we could never do ourselves.