Improve Your PPC Ads: Give Your Customers A Compelling Reason

The Technique

There’s a single word that can lead you to getting better results from your PPC ads.  That word is because.  Why is this word so effective?  Because whatever you put after that word acts as a justification or reason why a person should comply with your request.  And because people have grown used to whatever follows that word having good rationale behind it over the course of their lives.  Because of this, they can be more likely to comply with a request. (Because I just gave you this, you are now scientifically more likely to go do this test!). 🙂

Of course, the higher the stakes, the better the reason you’re going to need to get a prospect to take the action you desire.  In many situations, you can implement this principle in your PPC advertising by making your requests with a strong rationale, no matter how clear you think the reasons behind your request may be.  Let’s look at how I applied this principle in an ad test to achieve better results…

The Test

Here were the attributes of the test…

The campaign I ran this test in already had really good performance with Above Average CTR, but I thought I could do better.  So I decided to test this principle out versus another psychological principle that works pretty well (trust & credibility).  Below are the ads from the test.

The first is the control ad which played on the principle of trust & credibility in the 2nd headline by saying “From The Kitchens Of Experts.”  My hypothesis was I could get better performance by giving the reason of “You Won’t Be Disappointed.”

In my head, I used the word because to finish this sentence…”you should click on our ad and consume our content because…you won’t be disappointed!”  The thought process behind this reason was the ultimate goal of any cook – be it a professional or a homemaker – is that everyone who consumes their meal would enjoy it and therefore avoid the disappointment of a bad eating experience.

Side note:  This sparks an idea for another test of prevention vs. promotion.  Would phrasing like “Guaranteed To Satisfy” outperform “You Won’t Be Disappointed?”  Guess we’ll just have to find out later!

The Results

Here’s what happened in this test…

Click to enlarge

Almost all of our important engagement metrics improved, with CTR gaining a nice +23% increase and driving ~1,300 more Clicks in ~2,700 less Impressions during the test.

So if you’re trying to persuade people to click on your ad (or convert on your site for that matter), you should consider testing the compelling reasons why your customer would want to do so.