Selling the Click vs. Selling the Product: Which strategy is more effective for a text-based PPC ad?

Imagine for a moment that you need to write a PPC search ad for an event your company is running. It’s an event so you’re on a tight timeline. In fact, you have a week to run the ads. At the end of the week, your early discount of 5% ends.

Long story, short, you need to build a text-based PPC campaign that gets a lot of people to buy tickets, and you don’t really have time to figure out what strategy works through a/b testing or historical data mining.

What do you do?

An organization that [full disclosure] partners with MECLABS (MarketingExperiments’ parent company) to help optimize its event messaging was faced with a similar situation recently.

The strategies, while simple in wording are fairly radical in nature.

For the control ad, the primary message sold the actual value of the event.

“2 Days and 13 World Class Speakers”

For the treatment ad, the primary message sold the page on the other side of the click.

It was a fundamental shift in the process-level value proposition of the ad. One was aimed at the ultimate objective of purchasing event tickets. One was aimed at the shorter term objective of clicking through to the video mentioned in the ad.

The result of that shift was a 102% increase in thank-you page impressions. One important thing to note is that the average thank-you page impression generated more than one ticket sale. So this ad treatment hit the bottom line dramatically.

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