It’s finally here! This week sees the start of the London 2012 Olympics. Following Rob’s post “Olympic Preparation for your PPC campaign”, I thought I’d take a closer look at what the Olympics can teach us about ad text writing.
Competition – Above all the Olympics is a competition. Every athlete wants to win the gold medal and competition is also important with your ad text. Learn from sports such as tennis and fencing and set up a knockout tournament between your ads. Write two identical ads but change just one thing, perhaps the headline or call to action. Pit them against each other and once you’ve gathered enough data, decide a winner. The winner then moves onto the next round to face a new opponent – perhaps the same ad but with keyword insertion or a price. Soon enough you’ll find your gold medal-winning ad.
Teamwork – Here at Found we are a close team and like to help each other out and that applies when it comes to writing ad text. You can often get stuck in a rut using the same phrases and calls to action but sometimes it is good to see things with a fresh pair of eyes and share what’s been working best. We often pair up to look at each other’s campaigns and see if we can come up with ideas to beat the current top performing ad text.
Multiculturalism – Athletes, officials and guests from all over the world will be coming together in London for the Olympics and there are events across London celebrating the many cultures that are taking part. Here at Found we find ourselves writing ads targeted to many different countries and in an increasing number of languages. It is important to not just rely on a direct translation of your English ads when preparing a campaign in another language (or even in English, targeted to another country), but to get a native speaker or translator to read your ad text and write their own version, as there will be certain spellings, calls to action and other idiosyncrasies unique to that language that can make all the difference to CTR.
Team selection – In the Olympics you want your best athletes participating in events but so often people fail to give their best ads the chance to perform. I have seen many campaigns that are missing out on clicks and conversions because a poorly performing ad is being shown as frequently as the best ad. The rotate setting can be great for testing ads but make sure you use the ‘optimize for clicks and conversions’ settings to allow your top performers to shine.
So now you should have all the preparation you need to go out and write a winning ad and take home that PPC gold-medal!
