This week we are featuring guest articles from our PPC Hero allies! We requested submissions from our readers and we received excellent responses from some great PPC bloggers! The PPC Hero team will return to our regularly scheduled articles next week. Enjoy!

One of the reasons I love reading PPC Hero is that it’s written by people who actually create, manage and report on real campaigns – they therefore know that what people following the feeds: techniques, tips tricks and strategies that work to make your workload easier whilst generating the best results.

So in that spirit, I am going to do the same and give you some techniques that should raise your ads click-through rate (and therefore Quality Score) whilst seeding an action into a searcher’s mind so he is more likely to convert when you present him your carefully crafted landing page.

We are going to take the infamous example of the blue widgets and assume we are offering a free download of our amazing blue widget in exchange for a newsletter signup – but you could apply this to any kind of campaign.

Because the title is the clickable component of the ad, it is fair to assume that it will do most of the work for your CTR – I would say around 60%. Proof of this is the Dynamic Keyword Insertion, known to increase your CTR when placed in the title rather than in the ad. That said, I try to keep away from DKI when using broad match because it could put anything in there, especially if you are using expanded broad match. I’d rather have very tight ad groups, and a lot of negatives.

Ideally, you want the searcher to click the title having partly read your ad, having had action been suggested. This way, you save the click spend in case the searcher was not looking for this exact product, and should also raise your conversion rate. To help the searcher read your ad more, you are going to place the keywords in the ad copy, but in a sort of pattern. Let’s assume the search is ‘Easy Blue Widgets’ (which doesn’t mean anything of course).

Mindblowing Blue Widgets
Blue Widget Free Download with
The Free Blue Widgets Newsletter
www.Download.com/Blue_Widgets

What I’m trying to do here is drag the searcher downwards and to the right through my ad so he also reads the words I want him to read: Free, Download and Newsletter. You will have to tailor this depending on your ad’s position (I am a big believer that ads perform differently when you change their position). If the searcher is interested in the offer, he will go back to the title on his own, willing to convert.

Once you have used this ad pattern, you can then use it as a template for several ad groups through AdWords Editor or using an Excel Sheet with the concatenate function.

If you are going to try and steer some traffic away from SEO Boy and his ‘natural results’ (around 80% of searchers click on natural results), you are going to need to make your ad attractive using its title: use the search query and an adjective instead of a branded title and keep your ad groups tight. But most importantly, use the copy of your ad to encourage searchers to perform an action on your site, and the results will follow.

Guest Blogger Bio: Eloi Casali is a bilingual Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Performics, Publicis Groupe’s Performance Marketing Agency. PPC enthusiasth from the start, Eloi worked for SiteVisibility as a Paid Search Consultant and resident blogger before going back to his native city of Paris to become part of Performics. Performics was bought from Google by Publicis in August 2008 and has since then become the 360° performance marketing agency in which Eloi manages Paid Search campaigns.