What You Can Learn From Your PPC Ads

While the keywords within a PPC campaign are obviously extremely important, the ad copy is just as important, if not more so.  This is because to the general public, your ads are who you are.  They are the connection between you and your customers.  The way that an ad is written can have a dramatic impact on the performance of your campaigns.

In order to find out just how much of an impact it can have, I recently did a project for one of my clients that focused on their PPC ad copy.  I was trying to find which words or phrases (if any) had higher conversion rates relative to the overall average.  What I found was truly amazing.  Through the analysis, I found that there were in fact some words and phrases that performed 3 or 4 times as well as the average!

The question that you are probably asking yourself is “Why can’t I just have people read over the ad copy before it runs and use the ones that they like the most?”  While this is a good first step, it does not replace a real world scenario.  A lot of times, people do not realize what specific aspects of an ad resonate with them and cause them to take advantage of what the ad is talking about.  A lot of it is in their subconscious.  It is for this reason, that it is extremely important to run different versions of ad copy at the same time so you can learn about what works and what doesn’t.

Once the analysis was complete, those words and phrases that worked well in PPC were worked into the SEO efforts.  The thought process here is that, if they work in PPC then combined with organic listings they should work even better.

An analysis like this is not easy and cannot be done with haste.  It is however, extremely useful and the data that you get from it can afford you countless optimization opportunities both in PPC and organic listings.