After you’ve tried different PPC ad text position and display URL expansion it’s time to tweak punctuation! Varying punctuation on winning ads can improve conversion rates. You need to be careful, however, when varying punctuation in your text ads. Google has strict guidelines on what it will accept, with the risk of having your ads disapproved in the offing.
“Exclamation marks in the ad headline; repeated punctuation or symbols; symbols, numbers, and letters that don’t adhere to their true meaning or purpose, such as using “@ home” to mean “at home”; non-standard use of superscripts; non-standard symbols or characters, such as asterisks and vertical lines; bullet points and ellipses; excessive or gimmicky use of numbers, symbols, or punctuation, such as f1owers, fl@wers, Flowers!!!, f*l*o*w*e*r*s, F.L.O.W.E.R.S.”
There are exceptions of course like trademarks, brand names, and symbols used in commonly acceptable ways like “5*”. So essentially you can use numbers (“24 Hours,” “24/7 Service”), dashes (i.e., “eco-friendly”), commas, periods, and exclamation points!
Vary the Best Text Ads
As you test more ad text you’ll find that some text ads convert better than others. After you are sure you’ve got a winner, try different variations. You can flip words around, add expanded display URLs, tweak headlines, and vary punctuation. In this example we took the best text ad in our Ann Arbor Car Service campaign and tweaked (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: PPC Best Text Ad Baseline
This call only ad has an 88.9% conversion rate, costing $1.10 per click. This ad has two attributes we look for, high conversion and low cost. Next we tried varying the punctuation after the final word “Service” (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: PPC Text Ad Punctuation & Plural Variants
Results of Punctuation and Plural Variants
Adding a mere period after the last word in the ad (“Service.”) improved the conversion rate to 100% from 88.9%. It also kept the click-through rate about the same (6.9%).
The cost per click, however, increased from $1.10 to $1.61 (see Figure 2). We next tried changing the period to an exclamation point (“!”). This also improved the conversion rate to 100%, but jacked up the cost per click to $2.24, which was too high. Finally, we made the word service plural (“Services.”) and added a period. We found previously that making the word service plural lowered the cost per click in other ads. This tweak of our best ad boosted the conversion rate to 100% while lowering the cost per click (and call) to $0.83. As a bonus, it also improved the click-through rate from 6.9% to 8.8%. So far, this is the winning variant of our best ad.
Further Tweaks
Using an exclamation point and a plural is another possibility, but we think the cost per click may be too high for our criteria. We could also try varying the punctuation elsewhere in text ads, but we’ve found that the last word usually gives the most bang for the buck.
Conclusion
By varying the punctuation and plurals within your text ads, you can optimize their conversion rate and cost per conversion. Adding a plural plus a period to the end of our best text ad boosted the conversion rate by more than 12%, and lowered our cost per click by 24%.
Further Reading
- Google Adwords: Style and Spelling
- Google Adwords’ guide to style and spelling of ad text includes a section on acceptable punctuation.
- MiGreenCabs.com
- This Ann Arbor and Southfield Michigan-based green taxi cab company volunteered their AdWords campaign as the subject of this article.
- PPC Optimization: Ad Text Position
- Leading with benefits can improve PPC text ad conversion rates. We show a case study that improves conversion rates by 1.8X.
- PPC Optimization: Age Range Targeting
- You can target specific age ranges in Google Adwords to optimize conversion rates. By tweaking the bids on high performing age ranges you can tilt your campaigns to those folks more likely to convert.
- PPC Optimization: Average Income Targeting
- Targeting your desired audience within particular geographic area using income is a powerful tool you can use to improve your conversion rates. Average household income is just the first demographic that Google has rolled out for that purpose. Coming soon are gender, age, and parental status which could be used to further refine your campaigns.
- PPC Optimization: Display URL Expansion
- By including keywords or calls to action in your display URLs you can boost text ad performance in Google Adwords. This article shows a real-world example of display URL optimization.
- PPC Optimization: Gender Targeting
- In Google Adwords you can optimize conversion rates using gender targeting. Learn how to squeeze more leads out of your PPC spend by targeting high performing demographics singly or in combination.
- PPC Optimization: ZIP Code Targeting
- Learn how to add ZIP code targeting to your PPC campaigns to boost conversion rates. By optimizing the performance of individual demographics and locations, you can improve conversion rates to squeeze more leads out your AdWords spend.