RightSpot Media | Digital Performance Marketing

Write more effective ads on your competitors’ budget

Posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 10:26 PM by Simon Smith  |  Comments (0)

It’s not plagiarism. But whether you’re new to web writing or a veteran, even imitating other writers’ success probably feels unnatural.

If you’re new, you’ve likely never heard such terms as “swipe file” (a file of others’ effective copy you keep for “inspiration”), and never searched back issues of magazines to research competitors’ ads. If you’re a veteran, you likely find it hard to restrain your creative impulses. After all, it’s the innovative campaigns that win awards, not the “me too” copycats. Right?

But if you care most about results, the fastest way to success is to imitate before you innovate. In short, to let competitors do the hard work, then copy their success and experiment to exceed it.

With a looming recession, results are paramount. And in this holiday season, competition is tough. With that in mind, this post guides you step-by-step through a process you can use right now to leverage competitors’ Google ads to optimize your own ads’ success-a process that can work even better in highly competitive markets.

Step one: Know the theory

The theory’s simple: do what works, and let competitors pay to find that out.

In direct-response marketing, advertisers constantly analyze ads to find the best-performing words and phrases. The goal is to get the best return on investment for every dollar.

In print, direct-response copywriters can determine a competitors’ best-performing copy by identifying the ads they’ve run most frequently-thereby pinpointing which content delivers the most cost-effective results.

Google AdWords—the most popular and important search marketing system—is just another form of direct-response marketing. Ads rank higher on a page depending on factors like the amount an advertiser’s willing to bid for a click, and on the ad’s overall quality-judged in part by the percentage of people who click when it shows up.

Bottom line? In AdWords, a highly ranked ad is more likely to be an effective ad. This is for two main reasons. First, highly ranked ads typically cost advertisers more per click. So you can be sure they’ve made the necessary effort to make every click count. Second, highly ranked ads achieve high ranking in part through quality. So bad ads slowly fade into obscurity.

There are certainly some confounding factors that I won’t go into here. But in general, it’s safe to assume that in AdWords, higher ranked ads outperform lower ranked ads.

And typically, the more competitive the environment, the more this applies. For this reason, you can learn a lot about AdWords by simply reviewing results for highly competitive keywords like “insurance” and “weight loss.”

Step two: Google your keywords

So let’s exploit this knowledge to help you optimize your ad content.

Next time you Google keywords you’re targeting, pay attention to the ads that show up.

In particular, pay attention to the ads at the top of the page, or the top of the list on the right.

For example, here’s a screenshot for a search on “life insurance”—one of the most competitive keywords:

[insert screenshot here]

Here, the ads at top (in beige) and the top ads at right are likely the most effective at driving clicks for the keyword you’re searching.

Again, there are confounding variables (like some advertisers actually wanting a lower position), but in general you can assume that ads appearing either in beige or-for a highly competitive category like this-anywhere at right are effective.

To be more certain, repeat your search a few times and see which ads show up most often.

Step three: Analyze high-performing AdWords text

Now that you’re seeing some high-performing ads, you can:

• Subjectively review the results based on your understanding of your market and your marketing. With this approach, you can quickly identify copy that might perform well for you. Your biases, however, might undermine your review. For example, you might not want to consider applying the word “free” to your marketing, even though it’s making your competitors money.

• Objectively review the results using a statistical text analyzer. With this approach, you can quickly find words and phrases that effective ads use repeatedly. While density alone doesn’t guarantee success, it certainly helps guide you in the right direction.

Let’s talk about the second approach, which in my opinion and experience is one of the best ways to start an ad-writing campaign. (If you’re going with option one, skip ahead to step four. But you might want to read this before you do.)

For example, I fed the ads from four separate “life insurance” searches into the free (and fun) Textalyser, filtered out brand names and stop words like “and,” and found these to be the most common words in top-ranked ads (note that “canadian” and “canada” are due to a search from a Canadian location-and highlight the importance of location to insurance quotes):

• insurance
• life
• quote
• affordable
• canadian
• term
• rates (tied with term)
• canada
• save (tied with Canada)
• get

Step four: Create control ad with high-performing text

After performing your analysis, you’ll want to write an ad to serve as your control for future testing-so you can create variations and test their effectiveness.

To do this:

1. Use what you learned from your analysis.
2. Filter it through your knowledge of web writing and persuasion.
3. Adapt it to your offering.

For example, if I were writing a life insurance ad, my analysis above might lead me to a control like this:

Free Life Insurance Quote
Affordable Canadian Term Insurance.
Save on Rates-Get a Quote Now.
www.canadainsurance.com/LifeQuote

Every word here, with the exception of “free” (which almost always drives up clicks) and stop words (like “on” and “a”) comes from my statistical analysis of high-performing life insurance ads.
Step Five: Test Variations Against Your Control

While your control might perform well, it might also just be an average performer-after all, if you used a statistical analysis, it’s built from an average density across all ads analyzed.

So you’ll want to test it against variations. And here’s where you can get creative.

For example, a variation for my insurance ad might look like this:

Fast Life Insurance Quote
Affordable Canadian Term Insurance.
Save on Rates-Get a Quote Now.
www.canadainsurance.com/LifeQuote

The switch from “free” to “fast” might have an impact on performance, and if the variation beats the control then I might want to add “fast” to my word arsenal.

Tags: copywriting, featured, search engine marketing, text analysis