Laverne

I am often asked whether changing the words in the body of an Adwords advert can make a difference to the response and click through rate.

I usually give my standard answer. Yes, but why dont you try it for yourself.

I am always amazed by the number of people who set up an Adwords campaign and then just leave it to stand or fall by itself. They dont seem to realise, or care that it is perfectly possible to dramatically improve the response rate with some careful tuning. I think it is sheer laziness that they expect their first effort to be the best that they can do.

Google provides so many clever tools to analyse every aspect of a campaign that it is a crime not to use them. Especially when the prize for a little extra work is a higher position on the page, more traffic to your site and a reduced cost per click. Why wouldnt you want to make the most of your budget?

I know from bitter experience in my days as a pay per click novice how easy it is to waste hundreds of dollars for no discernible result. In fact apart from gambling I think Google is one of the most efficient ways to empty your wallet yet invented, if youre not careful.

However, I am a lot smarter now and I always spend the first few days of any campaign, with a low daily budget and careful daily monitoring of my results. Believe me, it pays off.

I recently ran a campaign to attract visitors to sign up for my newsletter. I researched my keywords, built a list, wrote an advert, then created two slightly different headlines using Googles ad variations option and left it to run for a few days.

When it got to a hundred clicks, which is my usual first checkpoint, I could see that one of the headlines was a clear leader. It was scoring a click through rate of around 2.9%; much higher than the other two. I dropped the two weaker ones and then created two more variations, but this time I kept the winning headline the same and changed the body copy around a little.

Once again I waited for about a hundred clicks, which came faster this time because I was using the best performing headline. To my surprise, I found that one of the new body copy versions had improved the click through rate from 2.9% to 3.8%; a significant jump.

Two further rounds of testing with some slight changes to the headline first and then the body copy again, raised the score of the best performer to 4.2%. But the best thing was that I was able to reduce my maximum bid price by a third yet still maintain my average position on the search page at number 3 or 4. So now I am getting more clicks for less money.

Of course I havent finished there. The next step is to weed out the non-performing keywords, segment the best ones into two shorter lists and then create specific ad groups for each, with more relevant wording in each advert, to see if I can improve the performance still further.

Yes, it takes extra work, but the pay off is well worth it. Once I have reached a click through rate of 5%, I will double my budget, safe in the knowledge that my return on investment is exactly where I want it to be.

Hi, my name is Andrew Grant. I hope you enjoyed this article. If you would like to read more great articles on making money online and self improvement, I'd like to invite you to subscribe to my free newsletter, which you'll find at : http://www.money-and-mind.com