Imagine if your top competitor just launched a search ad campaign featuring a 50% off sale, a BOGOF, or a new free shipping offer, and you didn’t know? What if they start promoting holiday deals a lot sooner than expected or kick off a new season of apparel unseasonably early?
Or maybe, as is happening a lot right now, they’re promoting a new “buy now, pay later” offer that consumers are loving.
If your first clue to changes in messaging like these is a drop in your paid search performance, you’re in trouble.
Ad copy is a vital tactical tool in search marketing. To wield it effectively, you need to know both what to say and what the other guy is saying. And those factors change all the time.
Ad copy is where the rubber meets the road
Ad copy can make or break your search campaigns. Regardless of how much you’ve invested in search terms, getting a conversion may depend on the rest of your ad — a price point, the incentives you promote, the strength of your call-to-action, or whether you feature something your competitors don’t.
In the example [below], you can see how many different copy angles are in play in the “sofa” market alone at a given time.
Above: Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for “Sofa”
Price point differentiators are clearly common, and in the Adthena analysis [below] you can see that DFS is sitting pretty with its ‘50% Off’ headline offer. Wayfair is also using a price differentiator, but it’s buried in the ad description, which may explain its lower performance.
Above: Adthena analysis: Top Ads for “sofa”
Slow delivery is also a pain point for furniture shoppers, and Adthena analysts have seen advertisers get success from using ‘free delivery’ or ‘delivery in 7 days’ in copy. Advertisers who ignore delivery messaging in this market are losing business.
Monitoring ad copy is essential. Doing it manually is not.
Manually monitoring ad copy is an incredibly time-intensive task. Search marketing teams are spending up to 10 hours on the task every day, as well as exhausting a lot of time and money testing ad copy to see what resonates with consumers.
These time drains can be eliminated by using Adthena to automate competitive analysis of ad copy, otherwise you may miss out on pertinent threats or opportunities.
Monitor competitors and partners alike
With the Adthena platform, you can automatically monitor all competitive ads in your landscape as well as your resellers’, partners’, and affiliates’ ad copy and how it’s performing.
At any moment in time, Adthena can tell you:
- Out of all the ads in your market, which ad messages are resonating with audiences and/or gaining the highest impression share
- Which specific incentives, price points, messages, and CTAs are getting the best results, so you can save time, money, and guesswork on A/B testing
- If competitors have made major shifts in campaign messaging and how consumers are responding
Strategic insights for your entire organization
Insights into competitor ad copy can inform and synchronize your other marketing channels such as PR and social, too. In fact, across your organization, timely ad copy insights can provide a powerful strategic advantage. Sales teams can use them to craft more effective promotions, and legal teams can quickly enforce against any brand infringements you uncover in competitor or partner copy.
Dominate your landscape with ad copy intelligence from Adthena
To boost your conversion rates, reduce costs, and save time optimizing your ad copy, Adthena gives you the market-wide competitive analysis and strategic insights you need.
Request a demo now or reach out to Lauren Hopson to get started (ask her about recommended copy change alerts — coming soon!)
