Two weeks ago I posted a BLOG entry called:
Does This Happen To your Google Adwords Campaigns?

I talked about how history plays an important part in getting good results from your campaigns (and by the way an update to that I have some campaigns that have been pretty much dormate for 3 months suddenly making me 3-5 sales a DAY).

If I’m doubling my money I’m happy, in fact I only keep campaigns I’m doubling my money in (of course now I know to wait it out just a little longer to see if I get a spark to it).

Anyway today I wanted to tell you about a Title strategy that I’ve been tweaking and testing. Many people have spoke about it but I’m going to explain it in a different way because sure it’s great to get a 45% CTR (click through ratio) but what if those click throughs don’t do anything?

And that’s what I want to talk about.

I’ve been testing a very broad market over the last few weeks on a CPA campaign. The user has to download and install a toolbar and I get $2-4 per installation.

I write 3 ads. The only difference was the Title of the ads.

Let’s say the product was a search toolbar with pop-up blocker. (it wasn’t but let’s say it was).
The first one was “Free Popup Blocker”

The Second one was “Download Free Popup Blocker”

The Third was “Free Popup Blocker Toolbar”

Then after a few hundred hits I compared them.

The first one was getting a 20.5% click through rate. Unforunately it was converting horribly. Now I’m bidding 15 cents so as long as I get more then that back (hits divided by total installs).  Unfortunelty this was converting exactly at 15 cents. So I was breaking even. No good, move on to the second one.

The second one was getting a 15% click through rate. Not as good as the first but… for every visitor I was making 3 times my investment!  Simply from adding the word Download.

And finally the third one. 4% clickthrough rate. (still pretty good compared to some other peoples campaigns I’ve seen).  But again just like #2 I was tripling my investment with this.

Now, Obviously number 2 wins. More clicks, the same results as #3. Definitely a winner for this test. Of course I will continue to test even more with things like

Question marks at the end of the title, re-arrange the words etc

So what did we learn from this one example?  Specifity in the title to the actual action the user is expecting to take is very important.

If they know before hand they will have to download or fill out a form, tell them! You will get more quality clicks.

What do you think?