PPC Ads that turn your neck: wins and fails

Thu 16 July 2009 13:15, Ulf Weihbold

PPC Ads that turn your neck: wins and fails

Writing good ad copy is not always a very easy task. The copy has to be engaging, relevant and additionally they should perform well as in having good conversion rates.

Since every ad copy writer always tries to achieve these goals, sometimes it is essential to think out of the box. In this article I listed some of the biggest fails and wins which I have seen so far:

Wins:

  • Woot 

When the Google Stocks went down by couple of percent in october last year, Woot had a brilliant Ad running:

Wootad

They bidded on the Term "GOOG" which is the stock symbol for the Google shares.

  • Bonobos
Last year on Cyber Monday the online store of bloomingdales went down, Bonobos reacted quite fast and created following ad:

Bloomingdales

  • E-Plus
I think it was T-Mobile, who had massive problems with their mobile network for a couple of days. Their competitors E-Plus and BASE reacted with following ad:

E-plus-ad

Translated to english these basically say: "Network outage? Order your cheap personal Flatrate at E-Plus" and "There are no outages with BASE, order now"

Fails:

  • eBay
eBay is always a good source of classic fails in PPC Advertising. There is a brilliant flickr set of the user Merlin.

One of the ads:

EBay%20-%20Used%20Diapers%20on%20Flickr%20-%20Photo%20Sharing%21

One big fail was posted a couple of days ago here as the daily search pic(k). I translated the german copy for all you english speakers in the comments.

  • Pronto
Looking for "used diapers" on Google i found this ad of pronto today:

Used%20diapers%20-%20Google-Suche


These are obvious wrong uses of dynamic keyword insertion. Using this technique, I always pay extra attention to the keywords and always try not to use broad match, because as you can obviously see, lots can go wrong there..

 


  • Comments (3)
  • SEA
  • Tell-a-cowboy

Comments (3)

 

  • Ouch! Used diapers... perhaps they should be paying more attention to their choice of negative keywords. LOL!!

    Thu 16 Jul 2009, 15:18


  • Not only can ad copy make or break your PPC Ad, but irrelevant keywords can drive bad traffic to your site.

    Brett gave a great example of how important negative keywords are! You never want set yourself up on broad match without eliminating those words, like USED DIAPERS, that hurt impressions and bring your QS down.

    A great tool to discover and manage keywords, and also create negative keywords is WordStream. WS's site offers a lot of content, white paper downloads, an insightful blog, and newsletters to read up and understand how important such topics are.

    http://www.wordstream.com/pay-per-click-advertising

    Fri 17 Jul 2009, 23:08


  • Actually, used cloth diapers are not uncommon. My mother used to buy a lot at yard sales.

    Thu 23 Jul 2009, 21:02

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