Bizarre Ways You Can Increase Your Click Through Rate

We as digital marketers often times find that our ads just run a stale course to flatlining and eventual death.

We split test ads until we get statistical validity, but sometimes it never comes or it takes a really long time to see any difference between the two ads you are testing. What do you do in this situation?

It’s time to get creative, and by creative I mean decorative elephant hedges creative:

While these tips may increase CTR, the amount of increase varies by industry, ad copy and bids.

Here are 3 tips to help increase CTR in your ads:

#1 – Ask Questions

Humans are naturally curious creatures. Asking questions in an ad triggers a yes or no reply in their minds automatically. This plays to the emotion of belonging and that someone else has had the same experience or needed the same things you have.

Questions also create doubt, which makes people want to find out more information to confirm or deny their doubts and insecurities.

Here is an example our fictional creative Florist might use:

or a Lawyer

#2 – Use Emotion

When writing ads to increase CTR, appeal to every emotion possible. People are motivated the most by Love, Fear & Hope. People want to show off, feel like they belong, and enjoy their freedom.

Emotions are a very strong motivators. Love makes you do crazy things like start wars, spend all your money, and go to the ends of the earth to find it. Fear makes you do things you don’t want to do, and hope starts revolutions.

Isn’t that right, Miss Katniss Everdeen?

Here is an example of appealing to the emotion of freedom and adventure:

or Love:

#3 – Create Urgency

Ok so you are probably thinking well duh, but how often do you actually use this in your PPC ads? It is easy to use the normal boring calls to action of “Buy Now” or “Call Today” or “Shop Now,” but try something with a direct, time sensitive call to action.

Creating a sense of urgency is often the best way to increase CTR, because it invokes a scarcity mentality, and we all want to be exclusive and have things that nobody else has. Try one of these urgent messages:

Sale Ends June 12th at 11:59 PM!

Use Discount Code 123 Today Only!

or

First 35 Orders get 15% Off

Obviously you don’t want to be misleading or misunderstood, so just adjust the ads when you reach those specific thresholds, but try different versions and test the crap out of different urgent messages.

Bonus #4 – Use Humor

Break the ice a little bit and ease that pain. The searcher is already in a pickle by using Google because they need an answer to a problem.

Tell a joke or ask a funny question. Humor and getting someone to laugh before they click on your ad increases confidence and they are more receptive and willing to do what you want them to do on the landing pages.

Larry Kim over at Wordstream has a very in depth article about click through rates. Check it out.

That’s It.

What are you waiting for. Go ahead and try some of these tips out, and let us know the results you get!