Tag: Adwords

Do Initial Caps Improve Response?

I was half-dozing through a Google Adwords tutorial the other day when something woke me up: the instructor’s advice that you can improve results by putting all the words in your ad, but especially your keywords, In Initial Caps Like This.

David Ogilvy must be spinning in his grave as if on a rotisserie. He railed against ALL CAPS in Ogilvy on Advertising because they deconstruct a word and turn it into a bunch of separate letters which the reader must look at one by one in order to make sense of it. Readers don’t do this. If there is any impediment to readability, they move on.

I have always assumed that Capitalizing The First Letter Of Each Word presents a similar problem, and I thought Ogilvy wrote about it, although I can’t find the source right now. But it’s the same issue of comprehension. Inappropriate use of initial caps means the reader sees individual words, not phrases, so it’s that much more trouble to seamlessly absorb the message. What’s more, overuse of initial caps gives your advertising a kind of stilted, affected, 19th century look. It’s certainly not what you want if you are selling a product or service which is closely attuned to the needs of 21st century consumers or businesses.

For these reasons I’ve always advised my clients against unnecessary initial caps, and often changed their copy if I get my hands on it. That’s why the Google “tip” is so demoralizing. Have people stopped reading copy completely, so they no longer have the mental acuity to focus on more than a single word or at most a keyword phrase?

Please, tell me it ain’t so. If you have testing experience with standard capitalization (what Microsoft Word calls “Sentence case”) vs initial caps, I’d love to hear the results. If initial caps are indeed the wave of the future, I’ll accept that. But I Won’t Like It.

Google, other marketers spend way out of recession

In an earlier post I talked about the argument for spending more to gain market share when others are cutting back, and cited Bed, Bath & Beyond and New York Life as success stories. Now comes news that Google, Juniper Networks, Cisco and Microsoft have launched major new campaigns into a still-roiling economy. “Everyone is trying to be the first mover,” commented Dean Crutchfield at one of the major tech agencies. “This is a market now where you’ll stand out or die.”

Coincidentally, Google’s Q3 revenue was up 7% year-to-year, in spite of tough economic times. Somebody is spending more on Adwords, that’s for sure. How about your company?

Best in the world UPDATE

After I wrote about how you could not find Google Adwords results for “best (x) in the world”, I went and tried the Adwords registration process myself. I found that I could not use “best” in my own ad because comparatives are not allowed unless from a third party. I COULD choose “world’s best copywriter” as a search phrase, but Google warned me my results would be so low that a CPC could not be calculated. That was around March 12.

But as of today (4/19/06), something’s changed. If you look up “best copywriter in the world” you will find lots of sidebar ads. 8 on each of the first two pages, 2 on the third page. I don’t actually think that all those people got the idea from my blog. More likely something has changed in the bowels of Google.

But I’ll stand with my original thought: nobody wants to hear you talk about how great you are, and the folks who do happen to click on these ads are not going to turn into leads. Let’s watch and see what happens over time…

Best in the World

We’ve all had clients who think the way to open a sales letter is to say, “As the world leader in intelligent solutions that do xyz, Acme Systems would like you to know blah blah etc…”

There are two obvious problems with this strategy. The first is that chest-pounding self-importance tends to put people off, not endear them. Readers want to know “what’s in it for me?”, not how great you think you are. And the second is that claims of superiority are not credible unless they are a/supported by hard facts and b/proffered by someone other than the person or company being judged.

You wouldn’t want to throw it in your client’s face that their self-centric posturing (which probably comes straight from the CEO’s corner office) is going to doom their campaign before it gets started, so here’s some useful third party validation: the U.S. Olympic Ski Team, which chose as their slogan for the recently-concluded Winter Games “Best in the World”.

The slogan didn’t say anything about the team’s passion or aspirations, as something so uninspired as “Striving to Be Our Best” might have done. It’s generic, anybody could have said it, and the only way it could have been remotely acceptable would be if you actually were best in the world, which our boys and girls demonstrably weren’t. So it became an object of ridicule, until ultimately Austrian skier Herman Maier, who actually is, shouted “best in the world!” from his victory podium.

Oh, here’s another objective test you can try with your client. Look up “best [insert your client’s business description] in the world” on Google and notice how many Adwords classified ads appear on the side. There almost certainly will be no ads at all. Try it with several variations and it will be the same. Meaning that everyone who has tried marketing to the phrase has abandoned it and it’s not even worth paying 1 cent for the top position. Best in the world, indeed.