Convince and Convert Blog: Where Social Media and Email Collide

Thanks to everyone for participating in my “Are you man enough to write a PPC ad about a woman VP” contest. Many excellent entries (see original post). Here are the results:

McCain is 72 years old 
Avg US life expectancy is 78 years 
Is Palin qualified? Read This 
DailyKos.com   1.31% Click-through rate      

 

Sarah Palin’s Secrets 
What the GOP doesn’t want you to 
know about McCain’s running mate 
sify.com 

2.66% CTR

 

Sarah Palin Revealed 
What makes her so special and 
why the Democrats should worry 
johnmccain.com 

3.62% CTR

 

Who is Sarah Palin? 
Exclusive stories, photos and more 
on the Vice Presidential candidate 
newsminer.com 

4.89% CTR!!!

 

Congratulations to Russ Hollmann (@hollmann) for winning the PPC Contest. He gets $200 from yours truly. 

Thoughts on the Outcome

I’ve been looking at the results and thinking about why Russ won and what we can learn from this contest. I’ve learned 5 lessons from this experience.

1. Mindset of searchers. Interestingly, Google took 3+ days to approve the ads. A call to tech support couldn’t even resolve it. Amazingly, they began running immediately after Palin finished her convention speech (insert conspiracy theory here).

Consequently, once the ads finally went live, I suspect there were more pro-Palin searchers than anti-Palin searchers, hurting the CTR of the lefty-slanted ad candidates.

On a similar conspiracy-scented note, the ads were set to run evenly for testing purposes. However, Google served 175% more of the pro-Palin or neutral ads than they did the negative ones. Hmmm.

2. URLs matter. I forgot that I had to put “real” URLs on the ads - not like the old days when you could do whatever you wanted. Thus, instead of having the same URL for each ad, I had to have the actual URL of the news story to which I linked. See above. For some, DailyKos is Kryptonite. The JohnMcCain.com URL may have been interpreted as less than objective (shocking, I know). The sify.com URL seems mysterious. Newsminer.com sounds objective and “newsie”. That may have helped Russ’ entry.

3. Don’t minimize your audience. Of all the finalists, the winner was the most even-handed. The other ads were clearly more appealing to one side or the other, which may have truncated their appeal commensurately. If you’re running a PPC campaign and are looking to maximize clicks, it may not work as well to take a strong stand in the ad itself - wait for the landing page.

4. Specific promises. In comparison to the other finalists, Russ’ entry promised stories, photos and more. I have seen through 15 years of Internet marketing experience that when you tell people exactly what they will get when they click, they are more likely to take you up on that offer.

5. Use of impact words. While all of the finalists used turns of phrase to make their ads interesting and engaging, Russ’ inclusion of “exclusive” may have helped win the contest. Given that by the time these ads launched, pretty much everyone not in prison knew at least something about Sarah Palin, the appeal of “exclusive” information may have been extremely intriguing.

How do you interpret these results? Add a comment

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Are You Man Enough to Write a Great PPC Ad About a Woman VP?

I’m using the puzzling choice of Sarah Palin as McCain’s VP pick to engage in a crowd-sourced search marketing experiment. Namely, who among you can write the most effective Google PPC ad featuring her?

The winner will receive $200 cash from the gilded vaults of Convince & Convert, as well as big-time bragging rights throughout Twitter, the Blogosphere, and maybe even among real people. 

The Rules

• Enter this scintillating contest by adding your best effort to the Comments of this post (see below).
• One entry per person please. Honor system.
• All entries are due by 6pm Pacific, 9pm Eastern time on Monday, September 1. This gives you something to do over your Labor Day weekend.
• The top 4 semi-finalists will be selected by me. I may throw open voting on Twitter if we have some close calls.
• I will create and launch a PPC campaign on Google next week and will run the semi-finalists as an A/B/C/D test. Bid amounts will be the same for all ads, etc. Search terms will be “Sarah Palin” and “Palin” - broad match
• The winning ad will be the one with the highest average click through rate, and will be announced next Friday-ish, September 6.
• Winner will receive $200 cash, check, or PayPal from me, and the opportunity to write a guest post on Convince & Convert about their winning technique.

Remember…

Google Adwords allows 25 characters (including spaces and punctuation) in the headline, and 35 characters for each of the two body copy lines. Please format your entry as:
Headline
Line 1
Line 2

…in the comments section. Don’t worry about a URL. I’ll make something up.

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