The old newspaper adage is, “Don’t bury the lede” — meaning to put the most interesting and exciting part up front in the headline or lead sentence of your story. If you lead with the less exciting parts, you end up “burying” it in the body of the article, where it might never get read.
But PPC Ads don’t have the luxury of “burying” much — either it gets featured in the ad, or it gets dropped. And a lot rides on the hard decision of what to feature and what to leave out.
So how do you make that decision?
Easy, you don’t. You let your customers make it for you by testing different ads with different offer elements in them. Then the winning ads can tell you which offer elements are most important, and which are so important that they should be pushed to the first line of copy or the headline.
Our most recent Win of the Week is a perfect example of this process:
One ad features free shipping and the other features the year-long return policy. Which one is more important?
As it turns out, the return policy beat out the free shipping offer by 149%
That’s why those of us in the optimization business say that “testing rules and opinion drools.” Because nothing delivers a bankable, real-world decision like a split test.
So which elements of YOUR offer are most important? And have you made sure of that by testing them?
Tags: Adage, Ads, Drools, Element, Elements, Free Shipping Offer, Lead, Optimization, Real World, Split-Test
What would be more than interesting to learn down the road Jeff is whether this (amazing frankly) return policy so up front attracts too many of the wrong buyers.
Bill, I think you’re right — that is the ultimate question, isn’t it? Of course, it’s also a question that is outside the scope of BoostCTR’s optimization mission. We use the offer elements that the client has available and optimize to boost response and conversion.
Only the business can look at lifetime value of the customer and re-prioritize the larger strategy behind their overall marketing.