Tips for writing Titles and Descriptions on Pay for Clicks.

[kapow]

It seems to me (new to pay for clicks) that the ideal Title and Description on a Pay for Clicks listing must have a 'filtering' effect, i.e. to encourage potential customers and to discourage everyone else from clicking (depleting your account).

One of my sites provides a local service, you must go to her shop to collect. I don't want people who live 500 miles away clicking on the link, so I feature the county name in the title and description. I don't know if this is the best way...

Does anyone have any tips for strategic writing of titles and descriptions in 'pay for clicks'?

[tigger]

I've been using UK within my descriptions for a while as I live in Hampshire & most of my clients do too. This has cut down the amount of enquires from New Hampshire and saved me about 15% on my cost.

With the amount of PPC search engines now going around the use of a specific location within the description could save your client lot money

[Brett_Tabke]

I've found that putting the domain name in the title (if they allow it) in caps, is a great discouragement from clicking. Anyone else?

[tedster]

The filtering effect is a biggie. It can be very important to pre-qualify the lead, especially when the kw is broad and the product/service is not.

I have one client who offers products for professionals in a field that has a lot of lay interest. We don't want layman traffic and the description is written to very clearly target the professional, using professional specialty vocabulary as well as explicitly stating the professional aspect.

We had a thread quite a while back that gets into the other side -- attracting the click. Writing good ad copy [webmasterworld.com]. This was my post at the time, and it still holds up.

FLAVAH WORDS
These are my ace in the hole. You know what most descriptions, heck most COPY, reads like. It's corporate speak, dry as dust, no spark at all. When you want eyeballs, you can't imitate the crowd. You got to have FLAVAH! Some flash, some style.

I've found that using one unique word at the beginning of your description pulls in the clicks. The word should be commonly known, short, but not bled dry by overuse.

Good "flavah words" will vary with the topic of the site, but most of all they should be just a little unexpected. Some examples I've had success in descriptions this year are: "Elegant" "Savvy" "Spunky"

Words that have the less frequently used letters in them (V-K-J-X-Q-Z) are also good at jumping off the monitor.

STUDY THE MASTERS
I find that magazine covers are a great source of inspiration. Those writers must do a very similar job of grabbing attention to what we must do in our titles and descriptions. Next time you're in line at the supermarket...

CODE BLUE
If the overall shape of the letters resembles an off-color word, that helps too. For instance, depending what font the word "flick" is displayed in, it can be very adult! Words ending in "...uck" all seem to be eye-magnets.

K-I-S-S
One other tip on all copy -- if you're not familiar with Strunk and White's "Elements of Style", get a copy. If you have it, blow the dust off and give it 3 minutes a day. This book was advising good web copy principles before even the Arpanet was created. It's been my best buddy for 40 years.

[Brett_Tabke]

Thanks Tedster. Excellent advice.

[tedster]

I've been experimenting with descriptions that look more like snippets from a web page, rather than being well-formed sentences and slickly written copy.

The idea hit me when looking at MSN and seeing all those glossed up sentencess at the top - they telegraph the fact that these are paid ads, and they just don't look "web-like".

So I'm working to develop some verbal camouflage, so that my PPC listings read just a wee bit more like a down-home unpaid listing... fragments and short phrases instead of grammatical sentences.

Preliminary results look pretty good.

[adamxcl]

That makes sense to me. I thought about something like that recently....you can distinguish the more ad oriented listings in results pretty easily versus what the engine found on it's own.

Haven't done anything with it as Overture's service has been so poor. I just haven't wanted to mess with modifications the last couple months.

[Mike_Mackin]

Don't put the price in your title if you think that the price will ever change causing you to be exposed to an editor review AGAIN.