There’s a lot of talk in the PPC world about quality scores, using the right keywords in ads and landing pages, and making “relevant” ads. But a lot of the focus on ad copy relevance seems to be on making “relevant” ads for machines, so those machines can scan the ads and conclude that they “match” the keyword and then award advertisers with good quality scores.
Making sure Google and Facebook’s machines know your ads are relevant to your keywords and audiences is important, but at the end of the day, people read and click on ads, not machines.
And one thing I’ve been focusing on lately is making sure I’m writing ads for people and hitting their pain points.
One example of this people-focused ad copy approach is a recent collaboration I had with a roofing company client.
They were planning to enter a new market and we were comping up with ad copy ideas together. We started sketching out buyer personas and making fictional characters to represent their target market.
Example – Sarah is married and 45 years old, upper middle class and lives in Dallas suburbs, she has two kids and is a stay at home mom, husband works for an energy company, they own their home and bought it 7 years ago, it’s their “forever home” and they plan on living in it for the rest of their lives, Sarah and her husband take a lot of pride in their home and want value and the job done right when they work with contractors, they don’t want to be ripped off and will do their due diligence and get multiple bids, but they are not very price conscious. They just want to find a reputable roofing company that won’t rip them off and will protect the value of their home.
After we sketched out the buyer persona of Sarah, we asked ourselves, what kind of ad copy does Sarah want to see when she pulls out her iPhone and searches “roofing companies in Dallas?”
We came up with two great ad copy ideas.
1) My roofing client told me that customers are always worried about shady, fly-by-night roofing companies that swoop into town after a bad storm and rip people off. He told me that lots of customers in the area are educated and always asking about “license numbers.” So to address this pain point head-on, we decided to straight up put the license numbers right there in the AdWords ads. So part of our ad copy literally says “License # XXXXXXXXXX.” This was a genius and out of the box move, it differentiates our ads from all the other competitors in the area, and it shows customers that we get what their concerns are and we’re addressing them directly.
2) Our other ad copy idea was to talk to the Sarah’s in our city and let them know that we’re the serious, reputable roofing company in their area that actually cares about their homes and wants to listen to them and their needs. So in our ads, we used a non-standard call to action of Let’s Have A Conversation About Your Roofing Needs. Instead of “fill out this form” or “call now for a new roof quote,” we decided to slow things down and show the Sarah’s out there that we know a roofing issue is a huge, stressful issue for a homeowner, that their roof issue is unique and important, and that we’re here to listen to them so we can know exactly what’s going on with their roof and then provide a custom solution to protect the value of their home.
These two “write ads for people” ad copy strategies have results in a 5.89% clickthrough rate over the last thirty days on a brand new campaign. We’re happy with the results, and we like that our search engine ads are not mechanical and cold. We like that we’re addressing customers’ pain points and we’re getting good feedback about the types of calls these ads are bringing in.
“License number” and “let’s have a conversation” are not pieces of ad copy that mechanically match keywords we’re using. And they’re not pieces of ad copy we came up with for machines. Instead, we focused on the people we want seeing our ads and their pain points.
Write ads and make landing pages for people, not machines.
