Get more Customers, Let them know who you are.
Use your name in your SEM ad copy and searchers will click (and even buy) more.
Between Managing countless paid media campaigns over the years, and our team’s ongoing research on search behavior has led to certain similarities between SEM campaigns creeping up. These similarities, and how you react to them, end up becoming the tactics that allow brands to truly grow their opportunity.
As many of you know, Google’s AdWords algorithm is getting tougher, even for legitimate advertisers. Your click through rates and how quickly your ad copy can achieve success is paramount in keeping an old campaign profitable and in some cases, a new campaign live. One of the many strategies that seem to work in most cases is including your brand and/or site within your copy.
We don’t mean just including your brand in your display URL, we mean in your actual ad copy. Mentioning your brand in your ad copy even if the actual URL in your copy is your brand, will drive more clicks than ads running without such mentions (A/B test this if you don’t believe me). Multiple site and brand mentions solidify the end users’ decision by convincing them that there is an actual legitimate presence behind an unfamiliar website. Much like television and radio commercials that press the brand name hard, searchers will respond in a favorable way.
In order to test this theory, we set up an ad group within a pre-existing campaign. Two sets of copy were created, one with no real brand mentions, the other with the actual URL within the copy. We set our ads to display evenly over the course of two weeks. Not surprisingly, the ad with the brand name included was chosen around 65% percent more than that with out the mention (and this was for a non-brand ad group). After this we elected to have Google optimize our ad in terms of rotation. Within two days, the ad without a brand mention had less than 5% of total ad rotation, and has since dropped even further, before being turned off.
Following up on this, I took a look at some of our long running campaigns. While compiling CTR and spend reports for 3 different clients with long running ad copy, we found the same brand preference trend. In fact, a deep dive into these numbers shows that the ads with brand mention included in their ad copy had a consistently high CTR. Then matching those ads up to our clients’ various analytics reports over the same time period we found that keywords with ad copy including brand terminology had a 35% higher conversion rate.
Hmm, that is really not such a bad thing is it?
Remember that there is much to consider when you are developing your ad copy. What works for one client or agency, might not work exactly as planned for another, but this is our experience. We suggest experimenting and trying different tactics in order to build your personal toolkit while impressing clients. As the engines adapt, our collective online marketing skills need to stay ahead of the game.
