Are You Getting These Benefits From Your Advertising?

There are so many side benefits to using Google AdWords that it's hard to know where to start. In this series of articles we'll look at how spending a few dollars a day can result in thousands of dollars worth of market research to help you better understand your market & blow away the competition.

In Part 1, let's look at the power of knowing which headlines speak loudest to your audience.

Your customers know best - so let them choose your next headline

How? By using the power of split testing. Write two ads for every group of keywords that you bid on. Don't worry about writing different description lines or display URLs. For now, just make the headline the only difference between the two ads.

Google will show one ad to half of the people searching for that group of keywords, and the other ad to the other half – automatically. No extra work.

By looking at the click through rate (CTR) that each ad gets over time you'll know which headline 'grabs' your target audience more. Great right?

But don't stop there! Far too many AdWords beginners just kill the losing ad & keep spending money on the winner. Instead, spend just 15 minutes a week deleting your losing ad in each group and writing a new one to compete with the existing winner.

This might sound like a lot of work, especially if you have more than a dozen AdGroups, but it pays off for a long, long time. Just one letter or one question mark could change the CTR of your ad by more than 100%

It's worth the investment of your time to find out what works and what doesn't.

So what are the side benefits?

Once you've tested a dozen or so headlines, you should start to get some good (even great) click through rates. There's no reason to accept less than 5% for all but the most broad keywords, certain markets will get 30-50%

Now take this headline (that's massively better than the one you started with) and use it in your other advertising:


- use it in your Yellow Pages ad if you still have one


- use it in local press


- use it as a poster in your store


- or as a headline on your eBay store


- even in your next radio ad if you use it

You can take this powerful headline & use it just about anywhere. What about the landing page on your website? Or your business card?
When your audience tells you what they want – it's your job to listen & then act accordingly.

"Give 'em what they want" and the sky's the limit.

In Part 2 of this series, we'll look at using AdWords to ethically spy on your competitors.