Time to Stop Obsessing Over Your PPC Ads?
Search Engine Land’s Alan Rimm-Kaufman wrote up an article with eight tips to improve you paid search copy. The tips include best practices for writing and testing of ad copy.
The tip I found most interesting was “Bad copy hurts more than good copy helps.” Alan points out in his years of experience in paid search that:
there's significant benefit in fixing bad copy …, some benefit from improving decent copy …, but the additional benefit that accrues from perfect copy is often small.
If you believe what Alan is writing it could have a dramatic impact on the amount of time you spend on writing and rewriting ads that are performing decently, but not perfectly. If you think in terms of Return on Effort, it might become obvious that all that ad tweaking you’re doing to make the “perfect” ad may not be giving you as great of a return as, say, building a new site or new PPC account.
Another point of Alan’s I liked was:
Test shouts, not whispers - Given how hard it is to detect performance differences between different copy versions, don't waste your time testing nearly-similar copy variations against one another. Test boldly different messaging – that's the only way you have a shot at discovering a new presentation that provably sells better.
I agree with Alan on this one. One of the issues we often run into when testing our ads at InsureMe is that we don’t really get data that is different enough to make any real type of conclusion about the tests we are running. On the other hand, when we do test dramatically different ads against each other we get a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t.
If you buy these two concepts it could have a very positive effect on your productivity, since it should let you quickly find a style of ad that works and have the confidence to let it run so you can get on to bigger and better things. So if you find yourself obsessing about ad text and testing small variations of your ads, it might be time to take a second look the return you are getting from all of that effort.
Make sure you check out all the rest of Alan’s tips for better paid search copy.
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