Bing Ads recent webcast was on the ‘Art and Science of Ad Copy Testing’, where speakers discussed about how to be creative and analytical with your PPC ad copy. Moderated by MJ DePalma and virtually moderated by Frances Donegan-Ryan, SEM Pro Marketing Manager, Bing Ads, Mircrosoft , the speakers of this session were Purna Virji (Sr. Bing Ads Client Trainer, Bing Ads, Microsoft), Erin Sagin (PPC Evangelist and Community Manager, WordStream) and Luke Alley Director of PPC Avalaunch Media.
You can view the webcast here.
Here’s the transcript of the video:
Introduction:
MJ: Welcome everyone to the Bing Ads Webcast on the Art and Science of Ad Copy Testing, a creative and analytical framework for optimum ad copy performance. My name is MJ DePalma and I will be your host today on the live webcast and Frances Donegan-Ryan will be your virtual host on Twitter.
Hi everyone. This is the Bing Webcast in our Advertiser Science Series and we are excited to share strategies and methods from our own Bing Ads experts as well as the perspective and ingenious ideas from two of the smartest people in the PPC industry, that I will introduce shortly. Before we begin, let’s review some housekeeping items to enhance your experience with us today. Our webcast console that you see is customizable on your side, where you can click the content widgets that you see on your screen and move them around or size them for your screen size. You can expand your slide area by clicking on the ‘Maximize’ icon on the top right of the slide area or by dragging the bottom right corner of the slide area.
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Last housekeeping item before we get started, we would love your participation at the end. We have a quick little survey. We would love to get your feedback so that we can improve in any way possible. So let’s begin by introducing who we have in the webcast today. As I stated, my name is MJ DePalma, and you can tweet me @mjdepalma and Frances will be also tweeting from her account, throughout the actual presentation, some key takeaways, so please feel free to follow her.
And we also have Purna Virji, our Senior Bing Ads Training Manager for Bing Ads. She has some fantastic content and methodologies that she has come up with, that she would love to share with you today. I can’t wait to hear from her. And then, of course, we have Erin Sagin here, PPC Evangelist, and Community Manager from WordStream. We’re really excited to have her on the call today as well as Luke Alley, from Avalaunch Media, who is the Director of PPC and I know Purna wanted to say ‘hi’, I could hear Erin wanting to say ‘hi’ and Luke, say ‘hi’ to everyone.
Erin: Hi guys, thanks for coming.
Luke: Hello everyone.
MJ: So let’s dive into the agenda, what you will learn today. So from Purna, she is going to get into some strategic framework for ad copy production and really like, she mapped out a strategy that really is quite smart, that maps back to the ‘Probability Conversion Formula’, so super-great subtle thinking here and we will try to share that with you and Erin is going to go into her top three tips as well as LUke is going to go into his top tips and also share some…a plethora of tips to help you get started, to just start the idea-making on how to start testing. So lot of material here that you can really up-level your ad copy creation process and testing, so without further adieu, I’m going to pass the mic virtually over to Purna. Purna, the floor is yours.
Purna Virji, Sr. Bing Ads Client Trainer, Bing Ads, Microsoft:
Purna: Thank you, MJ. I’m so excited to share this with you guys. So ad copy, that’s something we all have to create on a regular basis. What I’m going to share with you today is the Art and Science of Ad Copy Testing, but before I get started, I just want to let you know that you can follow along on Twitter, if you have any questions any time, to hit me up on Twitter. My handle is right on the screen: @purnavirji, and if you use the Bing Ads webcast #BingAdsWebcast, you will be able to get….quite quickly.
Alright, to get started, I want to ask you guys a question. MJ, Luke, Erin, all of you actually, why did you buy the suit that you are wearing? [Laughter]
Erin: They were cheap.
MJ: I loved the brand, so….
Luke: Yeah, mine is a mix sort of to the brand and they were cheap.
Purna: Yeah, that’s a good option, so mostly I hear from people, “I bought this because it was cute”, “It was cheap”, “It was….” or something, “I just liked it”. Beyond personal preference, we’re sort of hard-pressed to give you a definite answer to why we do things. Why do we take the actions that we take? Do you know where the answer lies? I will tell you. The answer lies within the jar of spaghetti sauce, and now you guys have to think fast that I have completely lost my marbles, but bear with me, because after all, aren’t all of life’s answers within food? Actually, I had realized that that’s not the case.
How many of you guys are fans of Malcolm Gladwell? He is fabulous. He is a journalist, writer, speaker, owner of awesome hair. I have been a huge fan of him for many years. I was watching a TED talk that Malcolm had given a few years ago, and in it he was telling us the story of this gentleman, Dr. Howard Moskowitz. He is the Market Researcher, Pschophysicist. He helped develop Cherry Vanilla Dr.Pepper, for example. He has been hired by companies like KRAFT and CampbellS’. Prety much things you have in your pantry-tray, he has helped develop.
So a super-smart guy. Prego went to him a few years ago and said, “Dr. Moskowitz, can you help make me a star?” They were trailing in the market behind to Ragu who was a dominant spaghetti sauce in the market, and they, Prego wanted to grow their own business and compete more with that. So they looked at Dr. Howard Moskowitz to help them with some research to see what they could do. So Dr. Howard Moskowitz, then they decided to do a whole bunch of research into different spaghetti sauces. Now, if you were to use…or…if you would like to think, “How many sauces would I test?” May be ten, may be twenty. Dr.Moskowitz is not…he tested 45 different sauces.
He tested anything from slightly more sweeter, slightly more sour, thicker sauces, thinner sauces, more herbs, more garlic…anything you can think of, he tested and he did that because he realized that what people want might be something we haven’t even thought of. That’s where testing is super-important, to understand what people want. In his test, he found that people really fell into three equal buckets. People either liked their spaghetti sauce plain, they either liked it spicy or they liked it extra chunky. The thing is that at that time, there was no extra chunky sauce from the market. So he goes and explains this to Prego and Prego was really surprised, so like one-third of Americans aren’t getting the spaghetti sauce that they want, and they saw this as a phenomenal opportunity.
Almost ten years later, and this 600 million dollar Star was tried and tested, their ‘Extra Chunky Spaghetti Sauce’. This came from trying to understand what people want, what they would like to purchase and how we can approach them, right? It’s all about getting things down to…getting people to pay attention. And now, you’re like, “Purna, that’s such a good story, but how does this apply to PPC Ad Copy?” Well, I will tell you. They have prompted me to give lessons here that will tie in well, because it’s not really a secret, but
we can influence our search audience with smart, effective ad copy and I’m going to walk you through how we can do that today.
So let me show you how to tap into the psychology of decision-making. Think about it. What makes you take ‘X’ action instead of ‘Y’? Or why do you choose to take in a certain route home? There are so many different things? I have five steps for you today. Step number one, think like a lizard. Do you guys remember, do you guys hear about Reptilian brain, where it used to be a really big thing….?
Erin: I remember that, Purna.
Purna: Yeah, exactly. The Conversion Rate Community was talking about this full march, really big 2012-2013, the people were really blogging about it and it is super-smart. It really does work, and I’m going to talk you through how we can apply it to ad copy. Now, for this, if you aren’t familiar with Reptilian brain, I will talk you through a 60-second background on it. Most of us have three brains. Now sometimes we may be surprised and think some of us have more brains, but …we have three brains. The first one is the ‘Human’, which is the ultimate layer and that’s responsible for logic and reason.
The ‘Mammalian’ brain is supposed to be responsible for emotion and then finally deep down within us, we have the ‘Reptilian’ brain that’s responsible for survival or ‘Flight or Fight’. Now let’s go…I’m not a psychologist, so this is a very, sort of, shortened version of the essentials of what we… Dr. Psychologist will have a lot more about to talk about! Now if I were to ask you, Luke, which brain do you think makes all the decisions?
Luke: I want to say ‘Human’, but I don’t think I’m that logical.
Purna: That’s exactly right. Like most of us assume that the logic and the reason side of us makes decisions, but it’s not; it’s actually, most of our decisions tend to get made by our ‘Reptilian’ brain. Let me tell you what sort of inputs motivate this. The Reptilian brain is motivated by pain, fear, emotion, ego, contrast, like the most basic of emotions. It’s almost like a bratty toddler within us that tends to control a lot of what we do. But as a team, we can use it to our favor. Let me show you how this is in action. A few years ago, Starbucks had decided to put in all the calorie counts from their menus for every single item. Erin, if you suddenly saw the calorie counts of everything, do you think you would…can view more calories per transaction or fewer?
Erin: Oh, my gosh! I panic about this all the time when I see the calories within.
Purna: That’s exactly right. The calorie per transaction went down by 6%, but something really interesting did happen as well. Whenever there was a Starbucks within a hundred-fourth radius of a Dunkin Donut, Starbuck’s store revenue went up by 3%. That’s where the Reptilian brain came into play. Think about it. People wanted to avoid the pain of making the wrong decision; they have the fear of gaining weight. They had the emotion, “I can make the right choice,” or their ego, “I know better,” or contrast, “sugary versus healthy” was what they perceived; that’s because they could see the calorie count. The Reptilian brain really wants to work on this one. Or if you think about a store that sells only one kind of beef, I could either label it as ‘1% Fat’ or ‘99% Fat-Free’. MJ, which one would you buy?
MJ: The one that’s ‘Fat-Free’. Because ‘99% Fat-Free’….!
Purna: Exactly. 99% is better than 1%, ‘Fat-Free’ better than ‘Fat’ is, despite it being exactly the same statement, we choose the one that says ‘99% Fat-Free’ – it’s just the Reptilian brain. Alright, now let me show you how we can tap into the Reptilian brain, see how we can apply these five principle into your ad copy, and I promise you I spent a couple of hours on Bing, looking up all the examples, so I hope you like them. Let’s start with pain. This is something that us advertisers have been admittedly pretty good at. We tap into people’s pain and then use it to make money, because it works.
Let’s look at this example. “Struggling to stay awake, less focus at your job? Try this.” Or have any of you ever had to clean out these trash disaster in your kitchen? I bet atleast one of us has had to, at some point, usually when we are either late or wearing the [inaudible 14:30] of course, or …just exhausted and that’s when the trash bag decides to break and the kitchen is a disaster.
If I was selling trash bags, reminding people, “Hey, remember Mackintosh disaster? How painful it was! Let’s move away from that. You want these bags,” and that is the way that I can motivate people to want to buy my product. So your takeaway is think about the pain point that people have and then you use it to your advantage.
Alright. The next one is emotion. Now hopefully Luke and MJ, please tell me that I’m not the only sap that gets a little misty-eyed whenever like a Hallmark Corey or the Budheiser commercial [inaudible 0:15:14]….
MJ: I don’t know….
Luke: I have 3 kids, so I think about my kids, ….I think about my kids, I think about my wife often when I see those.
Purna: oh! I know. Know that we can use this to our advantage though, as marketers. Let’s put on our mercenary hats on! We can make this money, and you don’t always have to think on such a large scale, as starting, you know, making people cry. Sometimes all we have to do is remind them about the simplest things, they are a little emotion… If I’m cooking, if I want to buy expensive or higher-end cookware, I’m buying it because yes, I want to be a better cook, but it’s not just about the actual art of like, “Here’s pots and pans, I’m going to make food in this.”
Cooking is more than that, right? I want to cook for my friends; I want to share meals with my loved ones. It becomes the whole experience. If I remind people of that, such a great way to get them more attracted to my cookware, that I sell. Or in this case, like Harley Davidson – why do Harley Davidson, lots of different… It’s so cool, it also gives you freedom, it’s thrilling, it’s exciting, but rather than just saying, like, “Just come and get attached,’ right, they are saying like, “Experience the thrill of this motorcycle,” right? It’s that little word and phrasing that connects with you.
There is one more example that comes from our friends, who we all know, Margot DaCunha from Wistia. This is an example of an ad she had shared before and I thought, “This is absolutely hysterical, to use multiple emotions in this huge ad – ‘Who is your husband with? Is he sleeping with her right now? Get revenge & a smile on your face.'” That always cracks me up, that ‘Get a smile on your face’ at the end, that’s just so funny! Now, of course, this is a really good exaggerated example of an ad, but pretty close as a way to attract a user emotion. Think about what moves your customer and use that to build a connection with them. That little [inaudible 0:17:24] can build good brand, goodwill and encourage people to want to purchase from you.
Let’s look at ‘Fear’. Fear is such an effective tactics. It sells as much as sexual desire because it drives people to take action, very similar to pain. If you are afraid, you want to curb that fear. So I often joke that some of the big brands, their slogans are designed to tap into fears that we have. For example, Nike – their ‘Just Do It’, it’s tapping into FOMO and I know Erin has this phenomenal section on how to use FOMO later, so we don’t want to miss that. Well, FedEX., The World on Time (FOMiD), that’s tapping into people’s fear of missing deadlines. Luke, can you guess what? “Because I’m worth it,” (FOTMA) is the fear of what?
Luke: Your self-worth.
Purna: Yes, it is the ‘Fear of Too Much Awesome’!
Luke: Okay.
Purna: That’s actually designed to tap into like a woman’s sense of top clothing…you know, you are worth it. So clever. But anyway, this is of course, I’m just purely speculating. Let’s look at some actual example of ads. If you worried about dry eyes and you’re just doing a quick search, and you see an ad that says, “Hey, chronic dry eyes is a disease,” now you’re going to get really worried, because, “Right now I want to learn about these syndromes. Should I go to my Ophthalmologist?” Or you may click the ad and see…
Or if you are looking to stop smoking, rather than something all encouraging, that you can do it, here it’s reminding you that, “Hey, smoking is deadly.” You know, it’s just another reminder that it could kill you; you don’t want to be afraid, “Don’t die. Let me come in, quit smoking and be healthy.” So it’s interesting that you can use this. As long as you add in some level of, reminding people of what they are afraid of, but you are not really being exploitative in it, you could sell quite effectively by using fear.
Alright. Fear was the stick, ego is the carrot on the other end. We have all seen ads like this, so Luke, you are a parent; likely, when you have seen ads like, you know, “Only good parents bring their kids to Disney”, or the [inaudible 0:19:48] on Facebook, right? We all see these quizzes that only 3% of people were able to pass this test and those different things are designed to appeal to our ego. Like, Red Bull Gives You Wings’ You want to get wings, you want to perform better, use Red Bull. Let me give you an actual example.
I was looking online to replenish some of my makeup, so I go to this ad and I did a search for different kinds of makeup and I saw this ad from Stila – cool ad; mentions “Same Day Shipping” available and they also have an annotation that they have poured into that ad. This annotation, which I have underlined here on your screen, so “For over twenty years, Stila has created innovative….” Now, this is a pretty good ad, but we can make it even better.
Look at this example from one of their competition. This is different kind of makeup and here she is talking to, ask the advertiser, “Hey, Perfect Your Eye Look! May be you should get a lit-from-within glow or be the first to shop it.” That’s little bit more appealing because it’s talking to me, so it’s just kind of resonates better. We all know this trick when we are talking about landing page copy,
Remember the WIIFM, the ‘What’s in it for me?’ So start to see as much of ‘You’, ‘You’,’You’ as you can and not ‘Me’, ‘Me’, ‘Me’.
We are all ultimately these selfish, ego-driven different creatures in some…to some degree, and we can …what’s better for us.
MJ: Hey Purna, this is MJ.
Purna: Yes?
MJ: Real quick, I’m sorry to interrupt, but we had a question come in that is really kind of timely and I just wanted to interject real quick. Travis, and the question is: Does using different emotions confuse the message to your customer? And I think he is thinking perhaps that you are saying to appeal to all these emotions at once, but I think you might be referring to concentrating at one at a time in your ad copy. Purna?
Purna: Exactly. Like try one, maximum two things in your ad copy, if you can. If you’re just focusing on the ego, then just talk to them about it, stroke their ego and test what works. For different products, each different emotions that you tap into could work the best. So even by seasonality, things could vary. If everyone is talking about their great sale, if you have an ad that speaks to ego, say, “Here is what we can do for you”, that might stand out at that particular time. So yes, it won’t be confusing if you just try to get the one and I’m going to talk through those frameworks very shortly that will help eliminate any of the sort of confusions that can come up, so a really great question. I’m glad you asked that. we’ll definitely be addressing it in a cool download that you can also take later. Alright, MJ, I am going to go on, just jump in any time, always love hearing from you.
So Contrast – how do you feel? So have you ever tried the Coke – Pepsi Challenge? It’s unawkward closer to home, we had the ‘Bing-It-On’ – which of you guys have taken that test? Contrast is a very interesting tactic to use. And if you remember, when the iPhone success first came out, some phones had this really clever ads that was meant to draw attention to them. They were like, ‘Awkward You Obviously – Mean the S6’, because they had a model that was the Galaxy S6, I believe. But interesting part is that, if you look at the description line, it said, ‘Our battery lasts up to 4 hours blah…blah…blah…’
Think about this. So some of the pain points for people with our cell phones is that the battery really dies quite quickly, so if you can reinforce that, “Hey, we have got a really long-lasting battery,” that’s a good way to make yourself stand out from the crowd. Let’s look at another ad that Samsung had done again,
So at the same period of, when the iphones had come out, there was a little thing in the news – some of the iphones being prone to bending a little bit. Samsung’s ad is: “The S6 Goes All the Way – To The Edge Without Bending”. Interesting. They were trying to call out floor to their competition without obviously talking down about their competition. They were just saying that, “Hey, we don’t bend.” It’s so interesting that they would call that out. And it doesn’t always have to be something on such a high level. MJ, are you a member of a Warehouse Club like Costco, Sam’s Club or something like BJ’s or something like that?
MJ: I am.
Purna: Exactly. Me too, because it’s great when we have a family to get things in bulk, but something that pinches me every year is that I have to renew my membership and like fork out a bunch of money. Somebody who is looking to compete with that could come up with an ad that says that, “Hey, we have…You can shop in bulk, but we have no warehouse club fees.” So interesting. They don’t have to say they are way better than X, Y or Z. They are just saying that, “You know that pain point? We don’t have that pain point” So what you don’t offer can sometimes be a benefit to you. So try some of these tests, two more brands or products and highlight what makes you stand out. Pretty cool, right guys? What do you guys think, good tips, the Lizard brain versus the Reptilian brain? [Laughter]
Luke: Awesome tips.
Purna: Just to….Alright, I’m going to show you how you can pick it up enough a little bit – that’s with the framing effect.
The framing effect is a cognitive bias; that means that you might affect how you respond to a particular choice, depending on how it’s framed.
Remember, “99% Fat-Free”, “1% Fat”? Exactly the same thing, where we were more likely to choose one over the other. It’s such a good, subtle small thing that you can do to test out. For example, “10% Off or Free Shipping?” It may cost you, the advertiser exactly the same, but the audience, I might perceive them as having completely different values or a check in that or even something as simple like a “Lifetime Warrantee” or “Free Service for Life” or just “Big Savings” or “Save Big” – I could perceive them differently.
So try testing the framing effect for some of the same choice in different ways and see how people respond, and of course, you want to make sure your URLs work. You want to give yourself more characters to shine! You will be surprised how often I ask someone that, “Hey, you also updated your Display URLs right, with your ad test?” And they are like, “Oh, I forget about to do that.” So make sure you don’t! You will just give yourself a few more opportunities to shine. Remember, you can test your framing in the Title, Description, Call-to-Action as well the URL.
Tip number three – Lively Verbs. Here is another story for you guys. A few years ago, there was a study done when the participants were made to watch a video of a car crash. One car hits another car. All the participants then were asked this similar version of the question: “How fast do you think the car was going, when it – a) smashed into the other car / b) collided with the other car / c) made contact with the other car?” What do you think? Do you think that having the different verbs affected the perceived speed? Yes, you are absolutely right, it did to quite a huge degree!
Between contacted and smashed, there was a perception of a difference of 10 miles per hour! How interesting! But you know what’s even cooler? A week after the study, the respondents were asking question, “Hey, do you guys remember seeing glass at the scene?” The correct answer was actually ‘No’, but about a thirty-two percent of people who had the verb ‘smashed’, said, yes, they remembered seeing glass. How crazy is that? Three single verbs, that one word could not only change your perception, but also potentially your memory!
Use this in your ads. Verbs are so powerful, guys. Remember when we were fighting as kids and our mums would be like, “No, no, words have power and use your words ….” Well, mum wasn’t like a… Using verbs are really important. But don’t just say, “Try these shoes”. Why don’t you say instead, “Rocky Cowboy Boots @….”, whatever your store is called. “Strut your stuff in these shoes!” You know, “Walk all over the town in these shoes!” That’s going to evoke a slightly different mental picture than just, “Buy these shoes.” It really does work! Test out a slightly different verb and you will see the difference it can make.
Tip number four – apply science. A few years ago, when I was in-house with [inaudible 0:29:08] company called Marketing Experiments to do some Conversion Rate testing for landing pages, they had a really cool formula that shows how you can increase the odds of getting a conversion and they said you need to make sure the motivation is really clear, they should understand the value proposition really well, there should be more of an incentive and you need to reduce any sort of anxiety or friction elements that could go to the purchase. To give you a thirty-second of analogy, think about Zappos as a company, right? Motivation value props., large selection of shoes; besides, you know, anything to fit any of the foot size, whether extra-wide or extra-narrow, and the prices are really good, price is very competitive, often really good low price, and it’s delivered to your door.
So that’s…all of us know sometimes the shoe just doesn’t fit or it is not comfortable. If you have to pay to return the shoes, that would be a friction and anxiety point. May be you would be less likely to shop online, if you have to stock out money to return it, if it didn’t fit. They understood that; they are testing, “Free Shipping,”, “Free …Shipping”, in fact, those ways they would reduce an anxiety point. Pretty cool! Let’s see how we can tie it to ad copy. What we do is we break each of these elements out, and put them in a grid. So this is my value prop., and then my tactic is going to be, I can put in the tactics that I think would speak to the value prop.
For example, quality, price, selection. Then I can write about what my messaging should be. Being seen with incentives…”Okay, I want to focus on incentives, what are different tactics that I could use?” Then I would go and then spell it out, would be , may be it’s discounts, may be free shipping, and I will scale out the messaging accordingly. If I want to do the safe thing, “Oh, how do I reduce friction?” “What do you think of bugging them? May be I can talk about quick turn-around, return policy, ease of use, think of..’What a great job! So easy to use, a caveman can do it.'” What are they trying to do? Reduce the friction of, ‘Hey, I want to…”, in terms of the competitive process, they are trying to show it’s not.
Or if you want to, sort of, reduce any anxiety points people have, it’s good to focus on things like credibility or try to put in more motivation and a time limit, so they feel more incentivized to take action now. Want to see these in action? So, at Bing Ads, we ran some of these tests. So we ran one test where we had….we tested using incentive plus anxiety in the same ad and then we tested one ad with just incentive. Erin, which one do you think is the best?
Luke: I’m going to go with the bottom…I’m going to go with incentive.
Erin: Okay, I’m going with the other. [Laughter] Incentive plus anxiety.
Purna: Yes, incentive and anxiety is the best because…yes…[Laughter] Now you will get about “$300 of Free Ads”, but with it, “Avoid missing another new customer.” That’s like, “Oh, great, I definitely want to not miss another customer and I can get $300 – fabulous!” Then we did another test of where should we place it? Should we put the incentive in the Description? Should we put in the Headline? Or should we go in a different direction and test out credibility? Same question, you guys – which one do you think is the best?
Luke: I’m saying ‘Headline’.
Purna: ‘Headline’ – you are correct. The ‘Headline’, this is the best, but look how closely anxiety and credibility came. Super-fascinating to think about what works! Just test it out with everyone – it will work really differently, so that is interesting to try out. Alright, my final tip now, because you’re going to get a ton of great ideas from Erin and Luke next, your brain is going to be buzzing, you’re going to want to brainstorm. I want to show you how you can turn brainstorming into a science. Try the three-step process that, it’s really likely to work.
Step one – build a foundation. Step two – you go crazy, and this is my favorite step and I’m going to tell you why and step three is you actually create your ads. What goes into building the foundation? Well, how do we know what motivates them, what’s the anxiety points, what’s their pain points, their emotion? I need to understand the customer to be able to connect with them, but you should be able to talk to the customer service reps. of the company who speak to the customers. They are the voice of the customer, but if you ask them that, ‘Hey, how do you motivate your customer to buy? What are the common objections they have?” – lots of different questions, they can give you really good answers that you can use for your research.
And the second, don’t forget to do some competitive intel and check out where the competition, what they are saying to your audience; we have to compete with them. But this will really help you put together your own grid like this, so you can be like, “Okay, now I know that for anxiety, I need to speak to this,” or “For incentive, I need to speak to this point.” If you can create your own grid like this, helpful. Can you imagine taking this in front of your client and be like, “Hey, this is why I am creating this ad?” They will be so impressed with you and then you want to go crazy.
That means step away from the Excel. It’s our default program that we go to, to open up, to write our ads, but it can stall your creativity
Because we are always looking at the [line] column and be like, “Oh, how about my cash account?” Don’t do that. Write about instead in like four sentences, without worrying about word count – you will get much better ideas out there. Then you can refine that and work it at the end into the final ad plus because you are taking the top-down approach, you can see, ‘It is a great messaging for my Headline and my Description. Now I know that for my Callout Extension, I want to add this” or “I may want to do this in this extension” so you can think of it holistically.
Now if you’re going to say you like this process of brainstorming, we have a little gift for you. MJ and I have put together this really cool Bing Ad Copy Workbook which you can download from this link: https://aka.ms/BingACWorkbook. It will also be in your upper right hand corner as well at any time and this walks you through exactly the three steps that you can walk in, share it amongst your team, share this with the client, make a case for why you are creating ads in this way, so I really hope you found these tips useful. I’m going to hand it over to one of my favorite women in the PPC industry, the lovely Erin Sagin. Erin, I would love to hear from you.
Erin Sagin, PPC Evangelist and Community Manager, WordStream:
Erin: [Laughter] Thanks Purna, that’s high praise and I must admit that’s a tough act to follow, those were some awesome tips. I have a couple of my own and they actually fall directly in line with some things that Purna was talking about. So as Purna said, my name is Erin Sagin. I work at WordStream, which is a PPC Management Software company based in Boston. And I am also a compulsive Twitter-er, so if you guys have any questions about what I talk about, questions about WordStream, do not hesitate to tweet at me: @erinsagin. I promise I will respond all hours of the day. I wake up in the middle of the night and check my Twitter. It’s a terrible habit, but I promise you good response time. So I will get started.
First things first, I would encourage you guys to leverage urgency in your ad copy. I will let you in on a little bit of a confession. I hate the dress that I am wearing in this particular photo, so you might be wondering why on earth would I buy a dress that I hate? And I will tell you exactly why. The original price of this dress was $1750. It is a super-super high-end dress. I found it at T. J. Maxx for a $109, did some quick math and that’s 94% off discount! So it’s a pretty impressive discount, and the cruncher was there was only one dress of this kind at this price left in the store. So even though I didn’t like it, I still ripped out my credit card. I couldn’t resist the deal and I knew this was my only chance to get this dress.
Now, I think we can all agree the ‘Fear of missing out’ as Purna mentioned is this incredibly incredibly powerful thing. In fact, the ‘Fear of missing out’ often overtakes a rational thinking. I’m sure many of you fell for the Beanie-Baby face, right? People were like fighting each other – Hallmark stores, in pursuit of these Beanie-Babies, of which there were very few models. It was almost like we all kind of were drinking a crazy sauce for a minute, right? All of a sudden we lost our rational thinking because we were so set on getting one of these limited edition Beanie-Baby in.
So you can use this urgency in your ad test to encourage people to dive in, take the plunge and convert. And you see it here, right, Kate Spade uses all sorts of urgency through her messaging for handbags, pushing people to “Shop the sale before it ends”, reminding them that the sale is going to end soon! But if you really want to take that to the next level, try using countdowns. These work even better. And here at WordStream, we have actually seen that countdowns yield such incredible results as a sale comes to a close, as product supply starts to diminish, click-through-rates and conversion rates increase upto 3x.
I think we can all agree that’s pretty mind-blowing and pretty powerful and if you can consistently offer sales and give people this sense of urgency and make them feel like they are going to miss out, they are going to be more likely to engage with your copy. So that’s just number one. Tip number two is get personal. [Laughter] Purna mentioned this earlier and I hate to break it to you guys, and reiterate it, but we humans, we are just inherently selfish. I think Kanye West does a really good job of exemplifying this trait that we all seem to have.
Every time you look in an ad, whether we like it or not, you know, we are kind of thinking about ourselves and you know, “What’s this going to do for me?”
And this is such a powerful thing and then we totally recommend using this to your advantage. My founder Larry Kim, he is a huge believer in identity-based targeting. He has been preaching for years that this is a game-changer in the advertising industry, and actually, you know, a lot of people seem to think that identity-based targeting is something that solely exists within the realm of Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and we think that searchers are these anonymous creatures, we don’t know who is on the other end of that thing, set up or who we are talking to.
But that’s not quite the case. If any of you guys followed the Google Summit a few weeks ago, you may remember that Google released a brand new thing that they are going to allow people to target by demographics in Search. You can set bid adjustments by demographics, but Bing was way ahead of the game on this one. This was Bing’s brainchild. They have a, “Let us target our user demographics” for years. And this is incredibly….for any ad test. Thank you, Bing. So I think, you know, you can kind of call people out in two ways, but mainly here you can bid by gender or by age and cater your ads to these specific people.
So when I think about gender, something that comes to mind, let’s say you are advertising for engagement rings. You’re probably going to talk about your ring very differently to the guys, who are like purchasing it versus the women who is likely counting that ring to try and convince her future fiancee to buy for her. So treat your ad copy per person by who you think the audience is. That’s going to work at the particular ad. So if you are bidding way up on guys with this one, you want to write ads that appeal to men who are purchasing right now.
Similarly with age – I think it’s really…it’s a good example. A few years ago we were moving in my grandmother into an assisted living home and every single person in my family was really searching the home that they thought was best for her. And there was a lot of debate in the family, but what assisted living centers can do is actually change their ad copy per age group, looking at it. If my grandmother is interested in something very different, then may be my parents are with this purchase particular facility, so again, if they can segment their groups, speak directly to the searcher and what they need and what they are concerned about, the ad test will be significantly more powerful.
And find some of this demographic targeting, you can also think of this ad customization in terms of retargeting, so we know you can retarget to people via Bing and it’s incredibly powerful within the search network showing ads to people who have already been to your site. And if they have already been to your site, then you already know something about these people. Now you certainly don’t want to be a creep about it, and what I mean by that is like you don’t want to be like, “Hey, you were on my site twenty minutes ago, clicked on my ad, but you pulled…”
MJ: Erin, this is MJ. Just a moment. Can I take control of the screen for a second?
Erin: Sure.
MJ: Okay, real quick, I see a VW bus on there and if you do a quick search in Bing for Wall Street Journal in my name, I just wanted to point something out, that you don’t have to be a creep to own a VW bus…[Laughter] Yeah, I love VW buses. I can’t believe you use a VW bus as an example to be a creep! That’s not right. And further, I want to go, remind you that you are actually sitting in a VW bus, so may be my bus isn’t too nice and it wasn’t that …but I just wanted to point that out. Anybody wanted to see Erin get interviewed in the Bing bus, you can feel free to click on that link or type that out and see the interview in the Bing bus. Alright Erin…
Erin: I retract. I retract my previous theme, madam. VW bus….certainly MJ’s. It’s not creepy. The creepy ones are the ones those guys offering candy at the windows. But MJ, your bus is wonderful. I’m a big fan. Definitely an interesting video. I think Luke may have made a appearance there?
Luke: [Cross talk 0:45:25]….
Erin: [Laughter] As I was saying, again, you don’t want to be creepy with your copy directed at people who you are remarketing to. Instead, really take advantage of them. If you know these people have not yet purchased from you, use your ad copy to sway them to take the plunge and I think one of the best ways to figure out how to do this is to review your reviews, so you want to use this copy to counteract common objections people have throughout the sales process.
I would like to jump in, look at our reviews, pick out why people were hesitant to purchase in the first place, and then again, in that ad copy, address it directly. Gives people a reason to actually follow through and convert. They don’t need to know who you are; they already know who you are. You need to address their objection. Similarly, if you’re selling to somebody who has already made a purchase, they are a returning customer, take a little page out of McDonald’s book. You know, they don’t just sell you the big Mac; they are always going to ask you if you want fries with that.
So in your ad copy, ask people if they want fries with it! May be they have already purchased something from you. They have already purchased a cell phone. Rather than trying to sell them another cell phone, sell them a case for their brand new phone, a complimentary package, right? I hope those tips are helpful and I’m going to pass it over to one of my favorite men in PPC, Luke Alley, to kind of round things out.
Luke: Awesome! Thank you, Erin, and on the Bing Ads bus video, I will give a $20 Amazon Gift Card to the person who tweets Erin and I and may be some of the Bing team – a line that Erin said in that video. You know the line, you will know the line….
Erin: Oh, my God! I’m going to get you back for that….I’m so going to get you back for that!
Luke Alley, Director of PPC Avalaunch Media.
Luke: [Laughter] Well, I’m just going to keep the summit going here. We have had awesome tips. I have a few more to round up the end of the webinar and first is feature testing. This is similar to what Purna was describing as the framing effect. Sometimes you get a new client and you are not sure exactly what’s going to appeal to your audience, right? I had a client like this. They do a free custom 3D builder for Minecraft and I, at that time, did not know anything about Minecraft.
I had heard of it, heard they were bought, it made a lot of money in that time. Since then I started playing that with my son, he is five, and even my wife, and they are both listening right now, so ‘Hi Mary, Hi Max’. But at the time I didn’t know what was going to appeal to this audience, so I wanted to test ‘Free’ versus ‘Custom’. And I’m just going to toss this out to Erin and Purna, any guesses on which one appeals to this audience more?
Purna: Oh, I don’t know.
Erin: I…to the custom, seems more valuable.
Luke: Okay, okay. So we tested that, right, and turns out that ‘Custom’ was the winner. In my mind initially I thought ‘Free’ might be it, more along the lines of…I think a lot about budgeting, and I think a lot about finances, right? Like, “Oh, this is free. You don’t have to pay anything for this,” but that audience we found out, the psychology behind them is they tend to be more of the, “Hey, I want to build this. I want to make something Custom. I want to do something that hasn’t been done before”, which Purna referred to earlier, right, use the Reptilian brain – kind of appealing to their ego, and “If I can make something that no one has made before, then I am going to stand out,” right and here are some swords that we have seen created in this builder.
My next tip is around grabbing their attention, right? And I’m going to go into presentation section right now. I’m going to talk about a presentation within this presentation. Here at Avalaunch Media, we’re a full service digital marketing agency, so along with pay-per-click SEO, we do a lot of design, a lot of content marketing and presentations are part of that. We make presentations that kick asterisks.
Still we’ve been doing this advertising for several years and I wanted to test something different last year, and looking back at it now, I kind of realized my mistake and it’s a little embarrassing to share this with, I think, hundreds of people are listening, but you’ll see the second ad here says, “Our presentations suck!” right?
I tested that against top listing presentations. “Our presentations suck!” – I tried to stand out, kind of draw their attention and highlight the fact that we have been seen on Forbes, CNN, New York Times, by saying, ‘Hey, just kidding, they are the best!’ right? Get them to read the ad. I tried to appeal almost to their emotions, but I think I appealed to the wrong emotion with what Purna had spoken to earlier, so if you have any guesses on that, you’ll probably know that “Our presentations suck!” did not do better. Had I watched this webinar couple of years ago, I would not have made that mistake, and almost got people thinking, you know, like sounds like my presentation is going to suck!
I imagine that’s the psychology behind that versus the ad on the bottom “Top listing presentations. They are creative, customized. We know what works!” – that’s the kind of psychology around the people searching, right? These are Realtors presentations, and so Realtors are looking for that.
My last tip will be around competing. If anyone has managed an account for more than a few months or even a few years, after a while, it can be hard to write ads, right? You might ask yourself the question, “Have all the good ads been written?” The answer is ‘No’. There is always more to test and one of the things that we do here at Avalaunch Media is we’ll actually have a competition and we make it fun too, right? So Erin, do you recognize the photo in the middle there?
Erin: Is that Matt?
Luke: No, that is the ‘Chewbacca Mom’ and she had a video go viral a couple of weeks ago. Her name is Candace Payne and she is an amazing woman. I watched several videos after her interviewing with…I don’t know if she is on Ellen yet, but she was on all the other Talk Shows. She was on ‘Good Morning America’, and she is actually a wonderful woman who just loves life, right, and so we tried to channel that energy that she has into ad writing, and we make it a competition, right? So we manage a lot of different accounts and we will go into an account, we will set up parameters for doing this test, but we’ll test against each other, right, and here’s my team, and these are the different ads that we wrote for this client that sells Toy Haulers.
And by doing that, you get some different ideas and you get different eyes on the account, different thoughts. Sometimes you kind of get stuck writing the same thing, it could be difficult to pull yourself out of that, but if you get other eyes on the ads and what your clients are doing, you can find new ways of doing your message. So the winner here was Dallas. With his ad, you’ll see had a 5.33% click-through rate versus all of the other ones. You should follow Dallas’s…I told him I would do this to the Twitter handle. It is: @DDP_PPC. He deserves that follow for his amazing ad writing.
And the step for this is very simple, right? We compile client info; previous ad copy – what the unique selling proposition is, any offers, kind of set that framework, determine what the goal is going to be. We usually do click-through rate, sometimes we do CPA. We track who wrote what and then we crown the Champion at the end! And just a note on this, when we do this ad copy testing, it is exclusive to device, right?
So when we…the last test that we did was on desktop, but we’ll do the same thing and we’ll actually do it in mobile and we don’t end up crossing the two because they do operate differently. So just as a note that you do want to do different testing because what appeals to somebody on desktop or even tablet, it’s going to be completely different to someone on mobile of where they are searching, what their mindset is, so we do those separately. So last thing I will share…yeah, go ahead.
Erin: I was just going to jump in. We have seen something, you know, just the teeniest tweak to make it mobile-friendly makes a big difference. Like I was saying, you know, the answers are at your fingertips or even referencing like, you know, a phone call away makes such a big difference. So we would definitely follow the same kind of splitting it up and writing a mobile-specific stuff to…
Luke: Exactly. Great thought, and I will say that’s going to change more and more, right? Right now, you know, people are using their phones more, they are calling, but how people use their cell phones, even their tablets, that’s going to change even more as, you know, as consumer behavior changes, so it’s good to keep testing that.
So last thing I will share is run, is talking about what if I run out of ideas? A couple of years ago, we compiled a infographic with 26 ad copy ideas, and there is a link there, if you want to visit that. I’m not going to go through all of these, but these are different ad copy ideas just to jumpstart what you are trying to do, and a lot of these appeal to what Purna talked about, what Erin talked about, of appealing to different emotions or their ego or what not. And I am not going to go through all these, but if you want to go to these, there are a lot of different ideas for things you can do and it can be creative, right?
So ads – seasonal ad copy, social proof, using a scary tone, adding price, reverse headlines – that’s kind of what I tried with the presentation example. “Does your presentation suck?” right? So “Don’t hire” whatever, and then talk through that. At the end here, a couple of more…using alliteration, right? Saying you are the official site – you know, sometimes that works for brand ads, but there is a lot of different things you can do, so if you are ever lacking on some inspiration, here is a resource that you can use to try something new.
So just to recap on my tips is just test different features; if you don’t know what to do, test them against each other. If you want to grab their attention, make sure that you do that the right way, appeal to the positive emotions and may be not negative and then compete – make your ad writing fun. So I’m going to pass it back to Erin, to recap hers.
Erin: Yeah. Thanks, Luke. Those were awesome. Yeah, I love what everyone has said. I’m going to go, write like twenty-two ads after this webinar, but my two kind of favorite tips are to leverage urgency and really…and I think this is going to get bigger and bigger in the next couple of years – customize your ad copy to the searcher’s location, device, age, gender or whatever that might be. And I will turn it over to Purna for her final recap.
Purna: Thank you, Erin. So I have really just two tips for you – tap into the Reptilian brain when you are brainstorming and trying to think of ways to appeal to different people and then use the conversion formula to create a proper framework around why you are writing that ad copy, a – so you don’t miss anything, and b – so you can really make a proper case and search, share with clients and also with your teammates or track what works in your industry. Remember, sports – brainstorm, so within a good framework. And MJ, should we have time for a couple of questions?
MJ: Definitely, everyone. We have two minutes and so that’s usually enough time to get some questions in. I know we had a question earlier that came through: “Should I include sale prices?” and I noticed Luke, in your competition, the higher CTR ad, that one, said something to the effect of, “Prices starting as low as” and I found that interesting, so one of the questions, if anyone wanted to answer a little further was: “Should I include sale prices in my ad copy?”
Luke: Yeah, so I can jump in on that. There is probably a few different considerations there. If it’s a price versus sales price, that might make a difference. Sales price, definitely, if you have some sort of sale, you want to make sure people know about that. I would include that. If it’s just price in general, we will include price in our ads to qualify to click. What I mean by that is in that example, I think we are starting at $10000 or $11000, that’s to qualify the type of person that we drive to our site, so in case they only have may be a $5000 budget for their Toy Hauler, we don’t have to spend money on that click.
MJ: Great.
Erin: This is Erin. Just going to say a second that we did something similar, especially when we are working with a luxury good or like discounts…like a cheap hotel – the more we can do the qualify and give people that upfront idea of what we’re working with, the better we can qualify that click.
MJ: Thank you Erin. I know we have time and can take one more question. So the question is: “Will the ad cost be lowered if the ad copy is more effective?” And I think the spirit of this question is really talking to probably quality score, I would imagine. So if you are writing better ad copy that connect to consumers, that speaks to what they are looking for, and they land on the page that matches that desire, I would imagine there is some sort of…some disconnection to a better effective CPC as it relates to quality score. It’s a little confusing, the question, but I thought you guys might try to take it…look at that
Luke: No, I have a thought on that, that we’ve been talking about a lot here, often times you will have a budget you have to work with, right, so may be it’s a $5000, $10000 budget. You can actually get more clicks out of that budget, more traffic; in essence you pay less by bidding down on those clicks, right? So if you bid down, you’re going to have a lower position, but if you have really good ad copy, and your ad can get a lot of clicks, then even if you are in the third or fourth spot, if you bid down a little bit, you will pay less for your clicks, but you’ll still get the same amount of clicks because you have written a really good ad. That makes sense?
MJ: Totally.
Purna: Just to jump in, John Gagnon, our wonderful colleague here at Bing, had a great slideback on how improving click-through rate can help improve your ad rank and so indirectly impact CPCs a little bit, so check it out from his slideshare, which is from HeroCon, back in April.
MJ: Thank you, Purna. We are out of time, and we want to respect everyone’s time, two minutes past, so thank you everyone who joined us today and we will be posting a blogpost with any unanswered questions that we didn’t get a chance to answer here. So we’ll address them in the blogpost and we will send out a copy of the deck through a ‘Thank You’ emails, all of you who joined us, but please feel free – we would love to have you next time join us on July 7th at 11 am for ‘The Science of Data Feed Optimization for shopping Campaigns’. It should be pretty powerful, if you’re interested in the retail vertical. We are really looking at data feeds and how to optimize those for really great shopping campaign experience. So thank you everyone. Have a great day, and talk to you soon.
Luke: Thank you.
Purna: Thanks guys.
Erin: Thanks guys.
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