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Managing Director at LeadGenerators Ltd
17 March 2006 16:32pm
Late last year I attended a Google seminar where they suggested that, instead of mirroring keywords in the creatives, what tends to be generating a higher CTRs were creatives that offered the benefits of the product or service being offered. One of the reasons stated for this was the fact that all creatives were looking fairly similar and that something fresh would stand out more and attract more attention. I diligently went back to the office and implemented these ideas into some of our client campaigns for both Google and Yahoo listings. We ran a few different creative ideas but whatever we tried, CTRs dropped.
Keeping in mind that there might have been other factors involved such as seasonality and just a run of bad creative ideas, although I am sure that the latter could not have been true :-) , this did not seem like a very profitable experiment. After a few months we returned to the original creative formula of mirroring and CTR results for our test client campaigns shot up again.
I was wondering if anyone else has experimented with this idea and what results you had achieved and what thoughts you could share with me and the forum readers.
Freelance Web Consultant at architxt.net
20 March 2006 16:37pm
Interesting.
Forgive my ignorance, but what do you mean by 'mirroring keywords' in the creative?
Thanks,
Lawrence
Managing Director at LeadGenerators Ltd
20 March 2006 18:48pm
For example, if your key phrase is "luxury holiday in Crete" then the title and/or description should have the words "luxury", "holiday" and "Crete" in them, as opposed to something like " Great low prices on holidays to Crete". The general idea behind this is that if someone is searching for "X", then we say that we have exactly "X". I hope that this makes sense? Regards,
Frank
Freelance Web Consultant at architxt.net
20 March 2006 18:49pm
Yes, it makes perfect sense.
I was just unsure whether it might have meants something more obscure than that.
I'll experiment with this a little when I have a chance.
Lawrence
Director at webviz
21 March 2006 09:43am
I agree with Frank. On several tests I've always found mirroring the search phrase boosts CTR.
ian.b@webviz.co.uk
Commercial Director at Adprecision.net
21 March 2006 16:26pm
Hi Frank,
Adprecision has done a lot of work in this area of optimising keywords, creatives and landing pages for SEM agencies.
We work with a number of large and small SEM agencies who use our system to automatically write the ad-text for each keyword group based on the client's product feed. For example.... if your client has 30 different 2 - 5 star hotels in Paris, the Adprecision system will automatically generate the keywords related to these hotels e.g. 2 star hotel in Paris / in April / May/ June / July etc along with all the different hotel names. It will then write the ad-text automatically for Google Adwords and Yahoo SM including important elements such as hotel names, prices, star ratings, board basis and hotel descriptions. Using the tools you can also define the rules to select which product offer "wins" each keyword. The ads are then frequently refreshed in Google and Yahoo to ensure accuracy.
The end result means that a) you spend less time cutting and pasting large spreadsheets full of keywords and creatives and b) get better response from your ads.
For an example do a search on Google for "Flight to Lanzarote in May" - our auto generated ad for XL.com contains the keyword and vital information for the user.
I'd be happy to share more info with you about this area.
Alasdair
director at greyrock
23 March 2006 07:56am
Hi,
I applaud the idea of generating new creative regularly - but what about quality score?
My understanding was that a modification of a creative meant that you lost the existing quality score for the keywords related to that creative?
So that would mean higher CPC until you had regained a quality score.
Is this correct?
COO at Latitude
24 March 2006 09:36am
Just a word of caution here.
While a high CTR can be good news in reducing your average CPCs or drawing more visitors to your site, it is only suitable if there is no adverse affect on your subsequent on-site conversion.
For example, you may make your creative more appealing (therefore increasing your CTR), but it may become less targeted (so the visitor is less likely to convert into a customer) and your ultimate ROi will decline.
Richard
E-Business Consultant at Dan Barker
24 March 2006 09:39am
According to the 2 or 3 experts & google reps I've asked about this over the last couple of months, your score isn't reset when you change creative (or display/destination URLs) - it's just re-evaluated using the old quality score as the base level.
I think there must have been some bad reporting early on, because I was under the same impression as you initially.
Director at Adprecision.net
24 March 2006 09:54am
Re the quality score issue when creative is changed - I agree that this used to be a problem up to about 6 months ago in that the ranking of an ad would dramatically reduce every time we made a refresh of the creative. Now however it does not affect rankings when we make a mass change of creatives thorugh the Adprecision system via the Adwords API. With some clients we are regularly changing the Google creatives, keywords and / or URLs twice a week based on their product feed leading to some considerable improvements in ROI.
With Yahoo (Overture) we can change the keywords, creatives and URLs daily without the hindrance of going through editorial approval every time a change is made.
This technology is available for clients and agencies to use to reduce the amount of time involved in managing / changing large campaigns and improving ROI through better quality ads.
Sorry if this is a blatent sales pitch, but we've actually been through blood sweat and tears in building a tool that can significantly aid SEM marketers in their day-to-day work whilst accommodating all the idiosyncrasies of the different search engines.
Alasdair