Optimize your ad copy to get more traffic to your site

The overall goal of any pay-per-click advertising campaign with LookSmart is to bring visitors to your web site.  We call this "driving more traffic" to your site.

Ultimately, to improve how well you are driving traffic, you can do one of three things:

• improve your ad copy to make your message more compelling
• modify the keywords you're using to target your audience, and
• change your Max CPC bids to be more competitive.

In this posting, we want to talk about improving your ad copy and how this affects your overall success.

When it comes to ad copy, I like to apply the So what? Who cares? and What's in it for me? standards when evaluating my ad copy.  Think about why someone would want to visit your site, what compelling reason there is to stop what they're doing right now, and why they would look at your site versus other sites that may be similar to yours.

In a text ad, you've got a limited amount of space to convince your future customers of these things.  So, you need to set up a plan to test lots of different types of text ads.

Testing involves setting up your ad to run for a limited amount of time and keeping track of how many clicks you get (luckily the LookSmart AdCenter does this for you through Custom Reporting).  Then, you modify the ad text  in a small way, and run your ad again to see how it affects your results.

You can test as many ads as you want at the same time, just remember the more variations you test the more complicated it is to figure out what's working and what's not.  Here are some of the things you can test in your ad copy:

• Discounts and Pricing Try ad variations that mention discounts or specific pricing along with others that do not.
• Audience Try using words that describe some aspect of your customer's.  Use words that make the reader think, "that's me!".
• Locality If your service or business is offered locally, use text that describes where your business is located.
• Brands If you offer well-known brand-name products, try some variations of your ad where you mention them by name.

Next time, we'll look at some of the tracking and reporting tools that will help you figure out how well your tests are going. We'll look at how to track "conversions" and we'll use the CPC by Position Report to help us figure out how to adjust our Max CPC bids to be more competitive.

If you need help figuring out how to optimize your ads, LookSmart can help. Please feel free to contact us by e-mail or call 877-512-LOOK (5665).

Allen Hammock
Product Marketing Manager
allen.hammock@looksmart.net