Paul Booth

Everyone’s talking about Mad Men, the stylish TV drama set in the sixties world of Madisson Avenue featuring Don Draper, the “makes women go weak at the knees” Creative Director of the fictional Stirling Cooper ad agency. One scene you’re never likely to see is when his boss waltzes into his office and says “Great news Don, we’ve won our first PPC ad campaign”. It would be enough to make Don spill his whiskey sour down his Brooks Brothers shirt. Creativity, you see, isn’t a word normally associated with Google Adwords and Pay per Click (PPC) advertising.

Ever since Google turned their search engine into an e-commerce gold mine with the Pay per Click model, it has been keywords and algorithms that have delivered results. Not to mention the gargantuan amounts of ad dollars, pounds, yen, deutschmarks, etc., that quickly followed. Here in the UK for example, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau, approximately £2 billion is now spent on paid search annually, more than is spent on TV advertising. Not bad for an advertising medium no one had of heard of a decade ago, or one that is made up of a couple of short lines of copy. But this could all be about to change. And if the latter day Don Drapers of this world want to remain in expensive suits and shiny loafers, they may have to start taking PPC ads more seriously.

So why this sea change? The simple answer is paid search has matured. Users are now more discerning when they search. They’ve got used to the medium and are becoming increasingly more receptive to more emotional and brand orientated messages. Paid search has many strengths. The ads are precisely targeted, they’re cheap compared to conventional advertising and they’re very effective, which are all things that marketers love, especially in these dark days of recession. But they also possess an inherent weakness. Every ad appears on a page surrounded by its direct competitors. There are 11 ads on any given full Google page, and they are all desperately fighting to get the same click every time a user alights on that page. And you don’t need to be a marketing genius to know these are not good odds.

The question many marketers are now asking themselves is how do I get noticed, how do I cut myself out from the herd, in short, how do I get the click. The brutal truth is if you don’t get the click then almost certainly one of your competitors will, and not only will you lose a valuable sale, but more importantly, a customer for life. It’s that critical.

Recently, this problem this has given rise to the emergence of ATO, or Ad Text Optimization. Basically, ATO is a copywriting technique which does for PPC ads what SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, does for websites. Previously, practically all PPC ads were written by the advertisers themselves – not by professional copywriters. But the advent of ATO has brought professional copywriters back into the PPC fold, because they are the only people with the necessary skill and experience to make ATO techniques work. And, of course, they bring a lot more to the party besides, like sector experience, direct response copywriting and branding know-how.

All this is serving to make PPC ads more relevant to searches and hence more effective at getting clicks. Plus, ATO experienced copywriters tend to write ads that get more buyers than browsers, an important consideration when you remember that every click costs an advertiser money, even when the person searching doesn’t buy. The advent of ATO has galvanized the industry in recent months, and you only need to Google the term to see all the buzz it has been generating.

This all adds up to a win-win-win situation. Search engines become more efficient, users have better search experiences, and advertisers see their Click Through Rates rise along with their Return on Investment (ROI). It looks like creativity and professional copywriting are set to take paid search to the next level. So the Don Drapers of this world be warned, creativity and copywriting are back in fashion.

About the author and the company

Paul Booth is founder of Copy4Clicks. Copy4Clicks brings ATO and professional copywriting to PPC to make it even more effective at delivering measurable increases for advertisers.

http://www.copy4clicks.com