Over UK & Espotting syndication

A list of how partners displays listings

[JonBoy]

Reading www.pay-per-click-search-engine.co.uk this morning I was reminded about how differently the syndication partners display the search listings. Obviously it makes a big difference to how you write your listings if you know that only the first x many words are actually likely to be shown! But the info on the above website (while good and with screenshots) turned out to be a bit out of date. So here's what I found in my hunting:

Overture UK partners

MSN UK displays in full
Altavista UK displays in full
Freeserve displays in full
Lycos UK displays the title in full on the 1st line, followed by up to approx. 68 characters of the description on the 2nd line.
AOLdisplays just one line with a total of upto approx. 73 characters, combining the title and beginning of description; however the full description is shown in a standard popup box on mouseover.

Overture UK Conclusion: Mostly people will see the whole listing, but it's good if the first few words can stand well on their own

Espotting partners

Yahoo UK displays 1-2 lines (normally 1) with a total of upto approx. 99 characters, combining the title and beginning of description; however, the first entry seems to get up to approx. 135 characters and tends to run over onto a second line
Ask Jeeves displays title in full on first line, and then description over next 2 lines, up to approx. 166 characters

Espotting Conclusion: Yahoo is the big partner, so make sure that the first 99 characters of the combined title & description look good on their own.

Note: in all cases where I give length limits, these seem to be chopped at the nearest whole word before the limit (words are never chopped in half).

Have I missed out any significant partners that it's worth taking into account when writing one's descriptions?

What do all the little partners for both of them tend to do? Are they allowed to truncate or is this a priveilige for the bigger partners? This might be a particularly important question for Espotting, as I guess that a bigger proportion of their traffic comes from small sites as they have less giants.

Anyone any helpful thoughts before I write my Espotting listings? :)

[Rumbas]

Nice round up Jon. Thanks.

Espotting's on Alltheweb too. Not a major site visitor wise, but anyway.. ;)

[webdiversity]

Although it's tempting to write up one campaign and then stick all of the keywords in there because they insist on the keyword being in the title/description it is sometime better to use the spreadsheet and submit each keyword in a campaign of it's own.

I'd also suggest that you try out a few keywords first to see if the editors like the site, and obviously deep link.

I find if you get even remotely close the the character limit with your ad then you are boring the pants off the searchers, short, sharp, to the point.

[toddb]

I like short and sweet but if you are paying for one of the higher up spots I like to put as much text as possible to "push" the lower ads out of the picture. This is something I just noticed so I do not have any data on it yet. It just seems to make a lot of sense.

[tigger]

thanks JonBoy.

great posting :)

[JonBoy]

I find if you get even remotely close the the character limit with your ad then you are boring the pants off the searchers, short, sharp, to the point.

Hi Jim,

I'm interested you say this. I had you down as an ROI fanatic, so I thought you'd prefer long descriptions as they more effectively prequalify your traffic, thereby driving up the ratio of sales to clicks/cost by discouraging the wrong kinds of clicks.

Also, what does "boring the pants off searchers" mean? If they can't be bothered to read a few words they're surely not likely to read the landing page and go on to buy the product.

As most people are still on 56k modems, there's a certain amount of "pain" (delay, boredom) that makes us hesitant to click on anything; doesn't long copy help build interest and presuade the person to click?

Or can you say that you've found on a number of occasions that merely significantly shortening copy (without otherwise seriously changing the message) has boosted CTR WITHOUT lowering conversion?

Be interested to hear you explain what your thinking is here.

Jonathan

[webdiversity]

Call it the Ronseal factor, tell them exactly what it does on the tin.

If you sell blue widgets then tell them you sell blue widget, even better tell them how much you sell them for, then they know what they can expect when they get there. Call to action is effectively what it is.

I am fanatical about ROI.

So

"Blue Widgets for sale - £10 each or 5 for £40"

will give you a much better conversion than

"Widgets R Us have some excellent value blue widgets for you to look at and test. We have been selling widgets for over 20 year and are widely recognised as the biggest seller of widgets in the UK"

Which ad do you think you know what you are likely to get?

Obviously it is hard to keep some messages short and sharp. I always try to include the price if someone is selling something on their site (assuming they are reasonably competitive, if not then focus on the major USP).

Short ads win the day hands down for me.

[JonBoy]

Ah, I see.

Yes, works well if the nature & benefits of the product is obvious to searchers; you don't need to explain the product, just call to action. And indeed the short examples you give are great for prequalification and thus ROI improvement because they're brutally purchase-focused; they only tempt people who really want to buy.

This didn't occur to me as my product is complex and not something that the searcher was likely to be explicitly looking for; I have to introduce them to the idea of the product and tempt them to look into it more.