As usual with the Win of the Week, you’ll have to pick the winner before we can go into why the winning ad won. So here are the competing ads — take your pick:

Picked your winner?

Good.

Now take a ballpark guess at how much the winning ad improved Click-Through Rates.

OK. The correct answer is Ad A by an astounding 419%! Whoah, right? So let’s look at each ad to see what’s driving this astonishing difference in performance.

The Losing Ad

Headline: The losing ad’s headline is keyword driven for “Baby Cradles,” so far so good.

And yet, this headline simply makes the claim that the company HAS baby cradles, rather than adding anything to indicate quality, savings, or kind of baby cradles. So in some ways, that represents a missed opportunity.

First Line of Copy: The losing ads first line of copy makes two unsubstantiated claims: 1) that the cradles are “wonderful” and 2) that the cradles are “on Sale.”

The Wonderful line lacks all credibility, but might be OK when going up against ads that make no claim on quality whatsoever. But when competing against an ad making a more verified claim, it’ll lose out.

As for “Sale” pricing, this remains to be seen, especially in terms of whether the price savings will more than make up for shipping charges on an item as big as a cradle.

Second Line of Copy: The losing ads second line of copy continues the first line’s use of unsubstantiated claims by citing the availability of “Top Brands” and “Great Prices.” Neither claim will be accepted by a prospective buyer/searcher, rendering this type of copy useless, except when competing against equally unsubstantiated and unemotional copy.

Displayed URL: This ad displays an attached “Baby” to the base URL, which is good, because it’s related to “Cradles,” but why not just put “Cradles” itself?

The Winning Ad

Headline: The winning ad’s headline not only uses the Baby Cradle search term, but immediately indicates that they are “On Sale.” Since baby cradles are available at most local stores, including Wal-Mart and Target, most people looking for cradles on line will be either looking for discounted prices OR luxury selection not available locally.

In other words, this is a much better headline than the losing ad’s.

First Line of Copy: The first line of copy makes an unsubstantiated claim, but mixes it with a concrete and substantiated adjective: “Stylish Wooden Cradles.” The “Stylish” is subjective and unsubstantiated, but the “Wooden” ads credence to the stylish part, and ads a sensory detail.

Also, the “In stock” lends credence to the store itself by indicating that the online store isn’t just a drop-shipper of other’s goods, and instead actually has the items in stock and ready to ship.

Again, this line of body copy is much better than the losing ad’s.

Second Line of Copy: This is where the winning ad REALLY seals in the win by providing a deal sweetener that objectively answer real buying concerns on the part of the searcher/shopper. “Free Shipping” answers the question, “will the prices be low enough to justify paying for shipping?” Answer: yes, because shipping is free.

Whereas the other elements of the ad would provide for a solid win, this is the difference that creates the gigantic performance difference evidenced by a 419% increase in CTR.

Displayed URL: Obviously, putting “Cradles” in the URL for an ad targeted at people searching for “Cradles” just makes sense. Another advantage for the winning ad.

In Conclusion

I’ve often said that seemingly small differences in ads can create large psychological differences in how those ads are perceived by searchers, and therefore yield equally large differences in performance. And this is true.

But when you have these sort of advantageous differences on every line coupled with one large, very important difference, now you’re taking the performance improvement to a whole new level. And 419% increase in CTR definitely qualifies as a “whole new level.”

But squeezing maximum performance out of every element of your PPC Ad isn’t something that’s done casually, as a collateral duty. It’s something that requires a professional (or at least experienced) ad writer along with a bit of testing.

And that’s exactly what BoostCTR is in the business of providing for your PPC improvement efforts…