David Szetela is one nutty dude. He decided to experiment with special characters in Google AdWords pay per click ad content. As I read his thoughts on the subject it dawned on me that Google has allowed the copyright symbol all along. Why not allow other special characters, especially ones that look like letter? I was really surprised by the number symbol that looks like the letter No. Cool idea.

The one I like the best, however, is the bullet points. This is a symbol that people recognize and it makes your ad really stand out. I’m thinking that bullets and asterisks ought to go over real well. I’m not sure about the greater than or equal sign.

But why not numbers? Precede your add with the number 1 or 2 and see what happens. The number may or may not bear any significant meaning to your ad. But if it makes your ad stand out among the cacophony of other advertising voices in the SERPs then it will serve its purpose. That is the whole point, isn’t it?

One of the most difficult parts to write of any ad or landing page is the call to action. Some writers spend hours thinking of the perfect call to action. Sometimes those hours pay off. But regardless of your writing method, it is extremely important that you write an effective call to action. Just what is an effective call to action?

A successful call to action is one that gets the reader to perform the desired action. That could be clicking through to the landing page, subscribing to your opt-in newsletter, purchasing your fanciful new whirligig in 3-D, joining your community, or whatever action you require to pay your bills. A good call to action gets a response.

So how do you do that?

The first step to creating a successful call to action in your pay per click Ads is to step into the mind of your customer. Who is she? What does she want? What motivates her? If you can’t answer these very basic questions about your client or ideal customer than you likely won’t connect with her. Your call to action will fall on its face.

Understanding reader motivation is the key to writing good ad copy or landing page material – all the way down to the call to action. Start there. And when you feel like you understand what motivates your reader to act, appeal to that.

When running pay per click advertising campaigns it is important to pay attention to the little details. I’m talking about details like proper grammar and good spelling. Even on little spelling mistake, even a common mistake might cost you some clicks.

People want to do business with smart people. If your pay per click ads are looking good – all except for that one niggling detail of a misspelled word – then that might deter people from clicking on your ad. While I concede that misspelled words could actually gain you more clicks and therefore net you an ROI, I’d also contend that you should run a separate campaign targeting those misspellings. Go to great pains to get rid of the misspellings and grammatical errors from your primary campaign.

Let’s say, for instance, that you sell mountain climbing equipment. You run an ad that reads

Go Mountian Climbing
Mountain climbing gear for
the professional climber.

That misspelling in the title can be real embarrassing. If the ad appears for searches where the searcher misspells the word “mountain”, that’s fine. But you don’t want it to appear for searches where the searcher spells the word correctly because it’s a negative image ad. Instead, rely on the misspelling for a targeted campaign where you attempt to reach other people who misspell the word. You’ll increase your CTR and your ROI by doing it intentionally and targeting the right SERPs.

Are you tired of paying high click prices? Does your quality score haunt you? There is one tweak you can make to your pay per click advertising ads that will get you more conversions and fewer clicks. It’s real easy to implement, but before I tell you what it is you’ll still need to focus on the same successful attributes in your ads that all other PPC ads have.

That is, your ads should do the following:

• Include a strong call to action
• Lead to a well optimized landing page
• Be well written and targeted to specific keywords
• Focus on fulfilling the target’s need
• Sell the benefits of contacting you
• Possess a synchronization between landing page and ad copy

Every ad you write for every pay per click campaign should focus on selling the benefits to your target audience. You should consider segmentation and target each ad to the correct segment. If you everything else right and add this one tweak to your ads then you can turn an already high ROI into an even higher ROI by lowering your CTR. So what’s that tweak?

You put your phone number in your ad.

Before you do this, make sure it makes sense for your business. Not every business will benefit from phone calls. But if you can close sales by phone then why pay for the click?

Google AdWords allows you to choose how your pay per click ads are served. You can have them served by optimization level (the Google AdWords default) or by rotating all ads evenly.

The optimize ad serving option rotates your ads based on CTR. The higher the CTR the more often the ad will appear to searchers. By contrast, the rotate evenly option delivers all ads at the same rate regardless of CTR. Jeremy Mayes at PPC Discussions wrote an interesting post a couple of days ago in which he thinks the best practice is to start with the optimized default setting then switch to rotate evenly in the second round of testing.

Essentially, the way that works is like this: You test several elements at once by creating a handful of ads and rotate them into the mix by allowing Google to choose the one with the highest CTR. Naturally, on Day 1 those ads will be rotated evenly since none of them have a CTR. But after a few iterations of the rotation schedule Google will begin to rotate 1 or 2 of those ads in more often due to the developing CTR. This is a savvy way to conduct multivariate testing on your PPC ads. Then, after figuring out which of your elements are working the best, you take the ad with the highest CTR and use it as a control in an A/B test against another ad using the rotate evenly option.

I can see where this might get you to the ad that you want to use quickly, but I don’t know if I’d call it a best practice. Whether you conduct A/B testing or multivariate testing first, I think, is a personal choice. I like conducting A/B testing on my landing pages first as this gives me the ability to test specific elements one at a time and narrow in on those elements that do well. It might take longer to go that route than to test multiple elements at once, but I think you get better results in the long run. But landing pages don’t cost me money while I’m testing except perhaps from those lost opportunities to convert while those elements that I toss out are in the batter’s box. Those moments cannot be helped and the information I gain from them helps me to improve my optimization so that I earn more from the landing pages in the long run. The question is, will that same strategy work for ads or is it better to conduct the multivariate testfirst?

I think anything that allows you to find the right ad quickly is a plus. If you are testing every element of an ad (headline, description text, display URL, destination URL) and you have more than 2 or 3 variations of each element that you are testing then perhaps the multivariate test is the best way to go. But if you only have two ads and you know those two ads are the ads that you want to test then the A/B test is probably the best way to go. In that case, I might go with the rotate evenly option so that I’m comparing apples to apples.