AdWords Tip: Quick & Easy Shortcut To High Clickthrough Rates

Google AdWords Quality Score, the key determining factor in what your ad positions will be, how much you will pay-per-click, and even if your ads will run at all, is determined to a large degree by each ad’s clickthrough rate, or, simply, what percentage of people who see your ad click on it.

As I mentioned in another article about ad optimization, having a high clickthrough rate doesn’t necessarily equate to more sales or a good return on investment. However, you still need at least a decent clickthrough rate to get good costs-per-click and ad positions; furthermore, very low clickthrough rates will get entire ad groups and campaigns penalized, or “slapped” as is the popular term for this.

Most importantly though, new campaigns, and new advertisers in particular, really need to crank up clickthrough rates quickly in order to compete with advertisers who have been using AdWords for a long time. The problem is that clickthrough history is permanently archived and stored in your account details and used long-term to evaluate and choose Quality Scores.

Long-time advertisers who have established clickthrough rates and Quality Scores have an unfair advantage from brand-new advertisers, and to a lesser degree, brand-new campaigns from established advertisers, simply because anything new starts out at zero clickthrough rate.

In order to defeat this problem, and quickly establish clickthrough rate history, I like to use the Keyword Macro feature within AdWords to create ads that generate extremely high clickthrough rates, very quickly.

Here’s how it works:

The Keyword Macro feature allows you to display the end user’s exact search phrase as the headline in your ad! The syntax for this is:

{keyword:default text}

with the “default text” being whatever headline you would like displayed just in case the user’s search phrase exceeds the AdWords 25-character headline limit.

A better way to do it is as follows:

{KeyWord:default text}

in which case the first letter of every word in the end user’s search phrase is automatically capitalized, making your ad appear more professional. Here is a real-life example of an ad from one of my campaigns:

And here is how it works in the real world:

Internet users are naturally more inclined to click on ads that show the most relevant headlines related to their search terms. By showing the exact search phrase as your ad headline, you guarantee very high clickthrough rates!

There’s a catch, though: As I’ve explained previously, high clickthrough rates frequently result in poor sales conversion, for the simple fact that your site may very well not have anything to do with the user’s search phrase, even though that is what your ad is displaying as a headline.

With that in mind, here are two thoughts on how to use this feature for maximum benefit:

1. Remember that you are using this strictly as a “trick” and a shortcut to get high clickthrough rate history established in your AdWords account and in a specific campaign. Do it for a few weeks or even a month. The result will be a bit of wasted ad spend in the short term, but tons and tons of saved money and lower costs-per-click, along with higher ad positions, in the long term.

2. Since you should always test and measure as many ad variations as possible in your campaigns, test this type of ad versus a static headline ad. Every now and then it will out-perform and you’ll be surprised at the results. I still have a handful of ad groups that permanently use Keyword Macro ads because they generate both high clickthrough and conversion rates.

For my simple ad scoring system which I use to determine which ads live and which ones die, see this post on ad scoring.