When confronted with paid search, the initial words that come to mind are along the lines of “boring”, “mundane”, “dry.” They don’t have to be. Businesses across all verticals often utilize this solution because it actually does work with the right strategy.

Many PPC specialists treat the field as a numbers game. They’re too busy with bids, conversions, and bounce rates that they miss to tap into the right section of the brain – the emotion, feelings, and intuition.

While the field owes a lot of its success to analytics and logic, we can improve PPC campaigns by a long mile by leveraging consumer emotions.

Focusing on Click-Through-Rate

You might’ve heard of Quality Score, Google’s algorithm that factors in previous performance, copy relevance, landing page relevancy, overall account quality, and click-through rate (CTR). Impression share increases by 9% for 1 point increase in QS.

Conversely, it goes down 9% for every 1 point decrease in QS. A low QS not only means low visibility on SERPs, but also you may also be overspending for your clicks, sometimes up to 400% higher than face value.

To improve your Quality Score (QS), CTR must be your focal point, and to earn high CTRs, you need to put out the best ads. Implementing dynamic keyword insertion may be effective to an extent, but it doesn’t really grab people’s attention as powerfully as you’d like. Emotions might.

Emotionally-charged Ads Drive Conversions

Think about the last commercial that really stuck with you. Chances are, it made you smile, laugh out loud, or cry so hard you couldn’t see straight for a week.

Recently, a German supermarket released a Christmas tear-jerker that made everyone in the world weep and collectively want to call their parents.  It dragged viewers across the whole gamut of emotions, from loneliness to grief to relief.

The ad didn’t sell the supermarket’s products, but told a story about the experiences and connotations we can associate with the products –like gathering everyone for a Christmas family dinner.

It’s not just TV commercials, content marketing or social media that leverage this strategy. PPC has just as much of an opportunity to utilize emotionally-charged ads to get the users clicking.

When creating that ad, here’s what you need to do to convey the most appropriate and effective messaging:

• Decide who you’re talking to. Is your customer a stay-at-home mother? A hippie organic tofu bagel eater? Long-distance family members?
• Choose the persona you want to take on when reaching out to your target market. Are you a hero? The devil’s advocate? The tease? The friendly advisor?
• Write your emotionally-changed messaging from that persona’s perspective, using the appropriate language and tone.

The emotions can range from anger and fear to happiness and flattery. Aim to elicit those emotions from your customers and you’re bound to get that click. At Spike Interactive, we like to shake things up a little and create campaigns that give you the edge you need.

Find out what our PPC specialists can do for you and contact us today.