Ad copy continuity clinic at SES Chicago

Just wrapping up SES Chicago, and it’s been a great week here in the Windy City — or snowy city as it turned out. Good start for the holiday season though.

Anna had a great session on Tuesday with Tessa Fraser of American Greetings, with the two of them providing an in-depth case study of American Greetings’ post-click marketing efforts over the past year. Excellent insights, not just about tactical best practices, but also about the organizational challenges associated with aligning post-click with the rest of online marketing and how to overcome them.

Tessa had a follow-up interview with Webmaster Radio that’s worth tuning in for.

A few hours ago, I was on the Ad Copy Continuity panel, which I previewed in my post on search marketing continuity earlier this week. SES clinics, with on-the-fly audience volunteers, are like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re going to get. Someone raises their hand, offers up a search phrase, you look at their ad, jump to their landing page, and dive right into analysis and discussion.

This time, we had a number of e-commerce volunteers, who buy ads associated with very specific products, and then drive respondents to category pages or search results pages on their own shopping engines. I understand why people do this — when you’re buying lots of Long Tail terms, it can be tempting to use existing pages so as to not have to specifically craft a landing page for each of a hundred (or a thousand, or ten thousand) different cases.

Unfortunately, this can lead to a lot of continuity problems, i.e., “message mismatch”. People search for something very specific, see an ad promising to fulfill that specific need — but then they end up on a page that is cluttered with lots of product choices, category navigation choices, ads for specials, email subscription call-to-actions, 800-number call-to-actions, returning user login options, etc. Through the eyes of the respondent it can be confusing and overwhelming, requiring them to do a lot of work to parse the page and find what they were after.

In an ideal world, you would have a landing page crafted to the very specific product being offered in the ad. Landing page management systems (such as, ahem, LiveBall) can make this practical — quickly produce new pages in a matter of minutes. Even if you don’t do this for all your Long Tail search terms, you certainly want to do it for your most popular ones, as dedicated, message-matched landing pages consistently deliver the highest improvements to conversion rates.

However, waaaay down the Long Tail, where that may not make sense, you might consider at least having a different version of templates of your category pages or search results pages that are optimized for use as landing pages. This means reducing the clutter, minimizing the navigation and extraneous calls-to-action, and perhaps elevating the visceral appeal with larger images and fewer product choices on that first page.

One other theme that came up repeatedly in our session was competitive differentiation in the search ads themselves. It’s very sobering to see your ad in the middle of 10 other competitive ads, all hawking wide selection, low price, etc. In those scenarios, we’re strong believers in testing copy ideas that are different than what everyone else is emphasizing.

For example, if your competitors are all about price and selection, what about emphasizing other factors that will help your ad stand out from the crowd:

• quality
• the particular market you serve (reseller vs. consumer, special niches, etc.)
• phenomenal customer service and/or technical support
• unique characteristics of your offering
• longevity of business
• brand/celebrity endorsements
• accompanying social community

Sure, sometimes you want to stick with the low price, wide selection message, but it can be worth testing alternative hypotheses.

However, as part of continuity, you must pay off the differentiated promise in your ad with the content on your landing page. If you’re going to emphasize quality in your ad, then you want to have left brain and right brain evidence of that quality on your landing page. (Note, any time you’re staking your brand on the quality of your products/services, remember that the quality of the design of your landing page itself is a proxy representation of your commitment to excellence.)

Thanks to everyone who participated in the session!