The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

In his Definitive Guide to Google AdWords, Perry Marshall makes the case that search marketing is just the latest and most sophisticated version of the kind of direct marketing that advertisers have been practicing for over a century. Even back then, he points out, advertisers recognized the importance of testing different versions of ads: “Advertisers quickly discovered that they could ‘key’ the order forms with a code, according to which magazine, which advertising copy and offers were used, and get enormously different responses. Within a few decades, this became a rigorous science...” Back in the early days of direct-mail advertising, testing ad copy variations took weeks or months: advertisers mailed out thousands of catalogs and placed hundreds of ads; waited for the orders to come in; and used the sales data to tweak their next set of mailings. With search marketing, you can start learning about the effectiveness of your ad variations within days or even hours.

Next week, Vernon will introduce a few tools that can help you test variations of your ads. Today, I’d like to talk about one thing that years (decades!) of testing have proven to be an almost universal rule: the importance of capitalizing your ad copy.

As I pointed out in my tutorial on writing effective search marketing headlines, your goal in writing a search marketing ad isn’t to get everybody’s attention; your goal is to grab your potential customer’s attention. Nonetheless, you don’t want to deliberately lose anybody’s attention, and having an ad that gets lost among the bold and the beautiful is a great way to lose everybody. One way to make sure this doesn’t happen is to capitalize your ad copy. This common best practice will make your ad more prominent, or, at the worst, as prominent as the other capitalized ads on the page. That’s it. Not rocket science, but these are the little details that impact Click-Through and Conversion rates.

Going through your ads one-by-one and making sure they’re properly capitalized would be a very time-consuming ordeal. Clickable’s ActEngine makes it a one-click process: if your top-performing ads aren’t properly capitalized, we’ll recommend you make the change. When you act on a “Capitalize Ad Copy” recommendation, every relevant field will be pre-populated with properly capitalized ad copy. Just accept the recommendation and your ads will perform just that much better.