Interesting reading your comments and certainly from own PPC efforts, its surprising which adverts work. Also very surprising quite often how you can get good conversions from one merchant and hardly any from another – both with the same product range and the same approx. prices.

Could spend ages agonising over why, but in the end the results of a live experiment cannot be denied ! Costs money of course, but not as much (if you value your time) as lovingly constructed landing pages which don’t convert.

Usually try about 3 adverts on Adwords in each adgroup to start with. One calm, one wizzy and one ‘mad’ one.

Just as a matter of interest, does anyone think that Google’s relevance rating (however its doing it) is turning the Adwords into a load of cloned headings ? Only if people are searching for green and blue widgets, it does seem that you have to pay more for using a heading that says ‘blue and green widgets’, or ‘two tone widgets’. End result, a column of identical adverts… not exactly in the public interest.

Off to find a trick on how to write an advert that looks different, but has the same relevance… back next year I reckon !

Brilliant article as ever but it was John Major who brought in the Back to Basics idea, not Mags.

Yours

An ex A level politics student

exactly the trap I was falling in.

Do you know of any books / sites / etc … that you would recommend that teach good copywriting ?

Display URL is the merchant URL. i.e. the ultimate destination of the link. Google and MSN are both happy for affiliates to do this.

anyways, if you send people direct to merchant, what are you using for your display URL? You don’t use your affiliate link correct?

That’s Google’s subtle way of telling you that your landing page didn’t cut the mustard. Back to landing page training school with you!

Frank – All in good time!