For just about any search query you will see dozens of different variations of punctuation, abbreviations, and capitalization featured among the paid ad variations. Data varies from account to account, within industries, campaigns, and even within ad groups so it’s hard to really narrow down any type of punctuation or capitalization as a “best practice” when generating ad copy, but I came across some interesting data today.

I was testing some Ad Copy for one of our clients in the online retail space.

We featured two ads that had the exact same ad message, the only difference between the two ads was how and which letters we chose to capitalize.

One ad featured title case (all of the major keywords were capitalized except for articles, conjunctions, prepositions, and forms of to be), and the other ad was in sentence case (only the initial word in the ad was capitalized).

The following data was generated over the past few days:

The ad that was in title case exhibited the following benefits when compared directly to the ad that was in sentence case:

• CTR improved by almost 1 full percentage point.
• Conversion rate was twice as high as the CVR for the ad version in sentence case.
• There were 3 times as many conversions in the title case ad.
• More revenue per conversion was generated via the title case ad.

I still can’t make any blanket statements as far as ad copy and best practices, but for this particular advertiser we will be using title case until further notice.  It has proven to be more effective in generating interest and revenue.

Related Posts:

• 9 Generic PPC Ad Copy Tests to Boost CTR

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 7:23 pm and is filed under Search Engine Advertising. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Bookmark and Share
del.icio.us | Digg it | Reddit | StumbleUpon