Improving creative in search advertising

Marketers who have spent money on display advertising, television advertising, or print advertising are fully versed in the importance of “creative”—or the actual advertisement used with these kinds of publishers. Less well understood is the value of creative in search advertising.

The headline and text you use are critical factors in the degree of success you will have in search marketing. Does the creative breakthrough? Is it differentiating? Does it have a clear call to action?

“Wait,” you may be asking, “doesn’t Google ask me to create multiple creatives for exactly this kind of testing?” Yes, Google does prompt you to create multiple advertisements for any given keyword. They even suggest language that might work. But that doesn’t mean that the typical advertiser, in their haste to launch new keywords and campaigns, is thinking of this as a form of creative testing.

Nor does it mean that Google’s system is set up to share information on what’s working and what’s not working—which may, in turn, improve the results of your campaigns on another publisher such as Bing, or even the call to action in a display campaign. You need to take control of your creative testing.

For example, are you ensuring your advertisements have a distinct call-to-action? Do each of your creatives point to distinct landing page addresses? (As an aside, landing page testing is a distinct field of marketing that we will cover in a different post.) Note I am only suggesting distinct addresses so you can measure the efficacy of a given creative.

Do you have a control group? Do you know the baseline performance of this control group? Have you controlled for other variables that might skew the results of your testing? For example, are the audience or other targeting variables aligned?

By looking at the multiple advertisements that you create for every keyword as a competition and normalizing the parameters and measurement around them, you will ensure that you don’t neglect this critical part of creating advertising that maximizes ROAS.