Didn’t Win The Powerball Or Mega Millions Jackpot? Try Your Luck At The AdWords Jackpot!

Chances are you didn’t win this past Friday’s $190 million Mega Millions drawing or Saturday’s $600 million Powerball jackpot. However, the great news is that if you’re an SEM account manager, you can still try your luck at winning the AdWords Jackpot! What’s An AdWords Jackpot? An AdWords Jackpot happens when all of the paid […]

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Image provided by the Multi-State Lottery Association.

Image provided by the Multi-State Lottery Association.

Chances are you didn’t win this past Friday’s $190 million Mega Millions drawing or Saturday’s $600 million Powerball jackpot. However, the great news is that if you’re an SEM account manager, you can still try your luck at winning the AdWords Jackpot!

What’s An AdWords Jackpot?

An AdWords Jackpot happens when all of the paid search ads for a search query are the same or are pretty similar. In this case, of course, having an ad that’s like all the rest is not a winning hand. Here are a few examples of hitting the AdWords Jackpot:

big-data-solutions

You’ve probably come across many AdWords Jackpots in the past, particularly when searching on queries that trigger product listing ads, like this:

ipad-mini

Of course, the reason I call this “hitting the AdWords Jackpot” is because it’s just like hitting a row of lucky 7’s when playing the slots in Vegas – and because there are valuable optimization opportunities to be had here!

Image used by permission from Shutterstock.com

Image used by permission from Shutterstock.com

Any SEM manager’s ongoing PPC campaign optimization activities should include periodically running a few searches on your most high-impression keywords using the AdWords Ad Preview Tool. Be on the lookout for any potential AdWords Jackpots!

What To Do If You Hit An AdWords Jackpot

In this article, I’ll focus on what to do when you win a standard text-ad AdWords Jackpot (excluding PLAs) – these jackpots generally arise due to a complete lack of marketing creativity on the part of the SEM manager, or excessive usage of Dynamic Keyword Insertion.

AdWords Jackpots represent a great opportunity for an SEM manager to do some good old-fashioned marketing and optimize ad text in such a way to differentiate one’s products or service offerings among a crowded pool of similar ad listings.

My respected friend and colleague, Perry Marshall has a pretty cool system for writing compelling and emotion-evoking ad text, which he calls his “The Swiss Army Knife,” as shown here:

perry-marshall

Perry’s ad creation process is basically an effective, structured way of brainstorming entities and relationships wherein you list out things like:

  • Your customer
  • A thing that your customer loves
  • A think that your customer hates
  • You (the advertiser)
  • Your customer’s worst enemy
  • Your customer’s best friend

Next, draw lines between the different entities in your list, then try to brainstorm ad copy that connects two of them. For example:

example-ad

Now, look how differentiated this new ad is compared to the boring and similar search listings on a search for [boston divorce lawyer], and you can start to see the power of this structured ad brainstorming technique.

devorce-laywer-ads

Not An Ad Copy Writing Genius? Don’t Worry – The Bar Is Pretty Low

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that most text ads stink. Hopefully I’ve demonstrated here that with just a bit of creativity and effort,  it’s possible to do way better than the rest of pack.

Best of all, the odds of realizing better ROI for yourself or your client are millions of times better than winning the Power Ball or Mega Millions. So what are you waiting for?


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Larry Kim
Contributor
Larry Kim is founder and CTO of WordStream, provider of the AdWords Grader and 20 Minute PPC Work Week.

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