The Difference is in the Details

So you’ve coined a great headline that is catching their attention. After your headline, you’ve still got a second chance to convince your customer even further that you’ve got what he wants, and get more clicks. This is where your inner salesman comes alive.

Compare these two ads and take note of the number of click thrus that each received with the same amount of views:

Popular Ethernet Terms
3 Page Guide—Free PDF Download      
Complex Words—Simple Definitions      
www.bb-elec.com
0.1% CTR                                           

Popular Ethernet Terms
Complex Words—Simple Definitions
3 Page Guide—Free PDF Download
www.bb-elec.com                                 
3.6% CTR

The second ad got 36 times the number of clicks as the first! What happened? How can two ads that have basically identical wording get such different click thrus? What was the secret? Look closely at the two ads. Can you spot the only difference between them? What is it?

The second ad, receiving the most click thrus, listed the benefits of the PDF first. While the first ad listed the  features and the free PDF offer first. This secret of PPC management is just as true in long-copy print advertising as in those little thumbnail Google ads.

Features and offers tell what  your product is or what you’re going to do. They describe it, what it includes, and how big or small or powerful or thorough it is. Benefits, on the other hand, are what those features do for you — the emotional payoffs one gets from using your product or service.

A list of features for an e-book you sell may include wording like this:

• 12 timeless principles
• 24 chapters, 222 pages of rock-solid content
• 64 full-color photos
• Helpful, easy-to-read charts and graphs
• Step-by-step tips and instructions
• Fascinating stories, anecdotes, and personal experiences
• Introduction by Bill Gates
• Etc.

But your list of benefits will tell your customer how they’ll actually be helped by what you’ve written. Sometimes there’s a little bit of crossover between these and the features:

• Achieve a 46 percent improvement in less than 30 minutes.
• You can apply any one of these 12 techniques immediately, and see instant results.
• Catapult Energy Levels, Convert Fat into Muscle, Develop Strength, Endurance, and Flexibility all at the same time.
• Discover how making more mistakes along the way becomes a strategy in itself that will grow your skill level even faster.
• Get compliments from your friends as they ask you again and again (jealously), “What has happened to you?”

There’s no way to pack all of this kind of content into a Google ad, granted. But the principle of dividing benefits from features is universal. Your Google ad is about benefits (emotional payoffs) more than anything else. And when you describe benefits and features both, it virtually always serves you to put benefits first.

In the world of PPC management you don’t have to be a poet or a master copywriter to convince your customer that he or she will get something of value. State your case simply and clearly, and test to see if putting the benefits up front and the features second will boost your response.

Does Anyone Care About Your Product or Idea?

Ten minutes from right now you can have a Google Adwords campaign up and running, sending visitors to your web site. The speed at which you can do new things to drive traffic to a website and make changes in Google’s system to increase or decrease potential traffic is stunning.

Having said that, if you launch an adwords campaign for a product or service that only 5 people in the USA look for a day, you might be waiting a long time for a sale! “Bright ideas” quickly made into a website, and hastily launched ppc campaigns will end in nothing but frustration if there is no one actually in need of your product.

There’s nothing more frustrating than building a web site and waiting for people to just “show up.” It’s worse than watching paint dry. That’s why PPC management is one of the most important parts of the online world. Your bright ideas and rush to market can also be a trap. Sometimes people do rash things when they haven’t properly researched their market.

It’s really easy to blow money on PPC management—you can pick a keyword, write an ad, and get a bunch of visitors who cost you money but have no chance of ever wanting to buy something from you. The following question will help make sure you don’t embark on a new business venture or buy the wrong kind of traffic for your web site. Ask this:

Are people interested in this Product?

Doing some preliminary searches with keyword tools can give you answers that will keep your expectations realistic and prevent you from running into disappointment later if you discover that there isn’t as big a market for your product as you’d hoped for and that online marketing can’t bring you as many new customers necessary to create a sustainable cash flow. Even if that happens, you may still discover other untapped traffic sources that may be profitable.

You can get a quick estimate of the possible interest in your product in a matter of seconds. Google has a helpful search-term suggestion tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. Enter a handful of your main general keywords, and Gogle will tell you how many searches its servers got last month for each one.

For example, you have a company which sells a skin-care product designed to slow the aging process. Let’s imagine you’ve just started and wants to bring more folks to your web site through Google. Where do you start?

The first thing to do is to brainstorm a starter list of possible keywords. You’ve got plenty to work from:

skin
beauty
acne
cosmetics
makeup
cosmetic surgery
dermatology
anti-aging
wrinkles
oils
moisturizers

And this is nowhere near complete. But if we go to Google’s  keyword selector tool and enter these terms to see how many searches they get in a month, here’s what we find out:

KEYWORD  /  LOCAL SEARCH  /  GLOBAL SEARCH
skin   24,900,000  /  24,900,000
beauty   16,600,000  /   20,400,000
makeup  9,140,000  /  9,140,000
cosmetics  5,000,000 /   6,120,000
acne   5,000,000  /  4,090,000
dermatology  1,220,000  /  1,000,000
oils   1,220,000  /  1,000,000
anti-aging  1,000,000  /  673,000
cosmetic surgery 823,000  /  673,000
wrinkles  450,000  /  301,000
moisturizers  301,000  /  165,000

Notice what’s going on here:

The keyword “skin” got over 80 times as many searches as the bottom term, “moisturizers.” That term may be one of your most valuable players.

When you run your Google Keyword search on any one of these keywords, you’ll invariably get a list of irrelevant terms as well. Those will become your negative keywords.

There’s a huge number of people who may want skin-care products but who’ll use different word combinations than are on the lists we’ve come up with. So for a successful PPC management, we’ll need to brainstorm for more, and then search Google’s Keyword  tool again. You can make sure the “use synonyms” box Is marked when you do your searches and Google will suggest additional terms you may want to consider.

According to Google, the skincare terms we selected are very high traffic words, suggesting that we could conceivably get tens, even hundreds of thousands of US searches in a month on those top keywords and confirms that there is a strong market for skin care products.