January 6, 2010

With PPC advertising, the best use of ad copy is not just to attract prospects, but sometimes to filter out searchers who are unlikely to become your customers.

Since you pay for each click to your site, when a click-happy searcher pops into your site just to browse or to do a little price comparison, you're probably wasting some of your precious ad spend.

One way to effectively ward off some of these searchers is by including the price of your product or service in your ad. You obviously can't eliminate clicks from these users entirely - if they want to click through, they're going to. But adding the price makes them less likely on average to want to click.

For searchers who sincerely think they might be interested in your product or service, your price acts as a great filter, keeping out prospects that don't want to pay or can't afford your price point. And if the searcher has zero interest in spending money, your price makes it loud-and-clear that they won't be getting any freebies by clicking your ad.

This strategy will likely lower your clickthrough rate (CTR), but this should be the result of filtering out poorly qualified searchers, the very reason that you included the price in the first place. To confirm that this is in fact the case, analyze your conversion rates before and after adding your price to your ads. If it increased after the change, then your strategy was probably successful.

The effectiveness of this strategy will vary substantially depending on your situation. The most obvious time to include your price in your ad copy is when you have the best price. Not only will you be filtering out some poor quality traffic, but the price will double as a unique selling proposition in your space. If you don't have the best price it gets a bit trickier.

If you're not the price leader but almost every other ad on the page includes price for a very similar or identical product or service, then you might have a good reason to throw it in your ad as well. A search results page littered with prices means that the price is a very important factor for this particular product or service. If you don't include your price, searchers are going to click your ad at a high rate just to check out your price and if it's not the best, then they'll probably bounce. But if your price is in your ad, and you are not the price leader, then you can be confident that most clicks are going to come from prospects that don't use price points as their only buying criteria, making them a high quality visitor.

Including your price in your ad text is definitely not a strategy that will help every advertiser using PPC, but if you're having issues with low conversion rates and high CPAs, it's probably smart to give it a try and test it out.

Get more ad writing strategies to test from our free Ad Writing Quick-Reference Guide.

We've recorded a few more AdWords strategies and posted a six-minute video to help you get better results with your online advertising.

Posted by Matt Siesing, PPC Specialist at 10:15 AM

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