Two (very broad) qualities that you want your paid search ads to have are:
Relevance and Appeal
Now, ‘Appeal’ has plenty of components of course…
We could discuss differentiation, urgency, tactics like scarcity and social proof, from Robert Cialdini’s principles of persuasion… or Drew Whitman’s eight ‘biologically hard-wired hot buttons’ (he does have an advertiser’s turn of phrase, that man…)
But as rich a topic as ad appeal is, plain old relevance is every bit as important.
And it’s more costly to get it wrong.
You don’t pay for the clicks you don’t attract. But you’ll certainly pay for the clicks you attract from people with the wrong intent… and you won’t have much to show for it in return.
So the job of our ads is not to maximise clicks. It’s to maximise relevant clicks….
And your ads are your last line of defence against appealing to the wrong people – before that appeal costs you.
When different ads have different conversion rates, it’s generally because of the different sets of users that those ads appeal to; not so much because exposure to the ads actually influences a user’s post-click behaviour…
In the same way that adding a price to an ad filters out clicks from some of the ‘wrong people’, including a mention of who the product is (and isn’t) for, is a good way to reduce the irrelevant clicks.
So don’t be afraid to use ads to narrow the appeal of your offer as well as strengthening it.
