I was recently forwarded a post from David Szetela of Search Engine Watch, Killer PPC Ads: The fundamentals, and I was a little disturbed. He was talking about ad copy and CTR.
“But first: let’s agree on one thing: the objective of your ad. Is it to sell your product? Get a sales lead? Nope. Your ad’s objective is this, and only this:
Get the click.”
This is why many companies do not trust PPC marketers, if ads do not disqualify you are wasting your clients budget on junk clicks. This is outdated thinking, clicks if they do not convert can be counter productive. Ad copy needs to be written to disqualify those who you do not want to click or that 25%CTR is just wasting your client’s budget. A myopic view of the role of PPC advertising can lead to a lot of waste.
CTR was weighted much heavier in the old model of Google Quality score, welcome to the new model, good luck keeping clients who look at conversions happy. Just because there may be a $0.25 difference in click cost due to quality score because of CTR who cares. It is all about the bottom line ROI. Executives care about conversions and return, not the smoke and mirrors of Click-through-rate.
For those just learning PPC marketing this is the road most marketers take, and they are giving us all a bad name. Next thing you know, he will be telling us that even with tightly grouped ad groups dynamic keyword insertion is a good idea, instead of writing great ad copy. Short cuts are never a good idea, and neither is only worrying about your stats. One of the advantages of having the whole marketing process integrated and on the same page is that the short cut of relying on CTR to prove PPC advertising’s worth becomes obsolete. When the entire online sales and lead process is handled by Movéo we are able to ensure that the SEM department doesn’t just pass the buck and blame your web copy for bad conversion. We work together to ensure our client’s get the results they demand and deserve.
When evaluating PPC campaign performance concentrating on conversions and transactions allows us to do exactly what our client’s want…
…get them new customers whose lifetime value far exceeds the value of a click-through that never converts.
