A Defeated Ad
For example, take a look at
the image below that was taken from the Google search results page when
searching on the keyword phrase "dining room tables".
 |
Would you have created the first ad offering 20-40% savings if
you knew your competitor's ad would appear directly underneath
offering 40-50% savings?
If you were shopping for a dining room
table, which ad would you be more likely to click? |
Beware of the 2-Line Deception
Have you ever read a
PPC ad placed directly above the organic listings that just didn't seem to
read well? Remember, if you compose your ad in the safety of the AdWords interface,
you're only seeing your ad as it would appear in the right hand column of the search results page;
that is with 2 lines of ad copy.
However, PPC ads that
appear above the organic listings combine both fields into a single line of
text. Here's an example of an ad that looks fine in the AdWords interface, but
goes wrong in a 1-line format.
| This is how the ad
would appear in the AdWords interface and in the right hand column
of the Google search page. |
Weight Loss
Vitamins
Thinking of using a fad diet? Don't
Try our vitamins first-see results.
|
And the same ad as it would appear if it showed above the organic listings:
|
Weight Loss
Vitamins
Thinking of using a fad diet? Don't Try our vitamins first-see
results.
|
If you're wondering
why we didn't put a period at the end of the 1st sentence, it
was because we couldn't - we'd already hit our 35-character
limitation. And, based on how the ad looked in the AdWords interface, we
thought our ad read fine without the ending period.
But the awkwardness of
that ad displayed as one line distorts our message, will tend to deflate our
click through rate, increase our average cost per click, and will likely
result in lost revenue opportunities.
That kind of miscalculation could have been avoided if the marketer created their PPC ad on the Google
search page.
But, how is that possible?
Until recently, it wasn't. But now, there's actually a quite easy way to compose your ad on a Google
search page with a free
software application from Engine Ready called AdFlintTM.
