Using ad copy to boost your click through rates
Amongst our many ROI driven clients, we work for an emerging force in the automotive servicing sector. This client has over 900 garages strategically based around the UK, but the hard sell is that we cannot tell the man on the street which garage his car will be taken to when he books online.
The nature of the business is kind of like an affiliate you see. The client takes the booking through their website and farms it out to one of the garages in their network depending on the user’s postcode, the type of car they have, the work they need to have carried out etc. This makes it tricky as we cannot give too many details to the user searching.
The client’s take on it was that he wanted to express the sheer size of the network and use lines like “900+ garages across the UK” which is in itself a compelling line to demonstrate the scale of the garage chain and implies that it is an established business with a strong history of good service. After all, you don’t grow to a chain of 900+ with poor customer service or an unsound business model. Fair enough. The 900+ message is a strong message in that respect, but is it the right message?
The Redweb Search way, we are sure like all other specialist search teams, is always focused on multi-variant testing and the 900+ line was just one variant.
Our team’s thoughts on this were also in another space: “I don’t care if they have 900+ centres across the country, all I want to know is do they have one in Southampton”. That is obviously a perfectly valid point, so the ads were written to focus on both the local and the national aspects of the advertiser.
- NSN – Southampton
- Low Prices Servicing in Southampton
- 900+ Garages across the UK
According to our stats, this ad performs pretty well with a very strong click through rate (CTR%). But “is this the best use of our limited ad copy lines?” asked Stefan (Search Executive). Stefan picked up on the fact that a user might feel duped as all we are doing is replacing a generic location with the searched town/ city (in this case Southampton). “If I was searching, I would hope the garage was a bit more local and not just a national chain with a massive search campaign behind them” said Stefan. Do users think like this? Without meeting 200 users and questioning them, we can’t answer that (see my last blog post ‘User emotion and statistics’). We wanted the national chain to be perceived as a local garage run by local people, like a sort of cross between HSBC and the League of Gentlemen.
- NSN – Southampton
- Low Prices Servicing in Hampshire
- 900+ Garages across the UK
Can you spot the subtle difference? What we did was replace the town/city (in this case Southampton) with the county. In our mind, this could have the effect of making the searcher feel reassured that the garage offered a good local service. Obviously, we have made some assumptions here (they actually want a local garage, they actually read the ads and don’t just click on the first one etc). What we found was the second ad (town and county) achieved a significantly higher CTR% than the first ad (town and town). Amazing what a slight change in copy and the thinking behind it can achieve.
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