How to spend lots of money on Adwords and not make a cent the Paypal way

Paypal are throwing their money away. Just literally burning it. Earlier today, I did a search on Google for the keyword “skydiving”. Now I’m kind of interested in the skydiving industry, so when I saw a new ad for “Paypal Offers”, it caught my interest. I was amazed to see just how bad this campaign is, and the simple mistakes Paypal are making in a big way.

Paypal is a massive company and takes lots of money from me, my clients, and most likely you, every day. They have no excuse for such a poor campaign, but some of the mistakes they’re making are actually very good examples of what not to do, so I’ve decided to go ahead give Paypal some free advice.

Lets see what they’ve done

So I do a search on the keyword “skydiving”, and I’m presented with this ad at position #2:

Paypal's Google Adwords Ad

This ad has some good points. The keyword is in the title, it is in Camel-case (every word beings with a capital), and has good punctuation. All good practices.

It strikes me that this ad has some things right about it, because it means that the person creating it had to know something, but (sorry Paypal) from here on in, the news is all bad.

So what’s wrong with the ad text?

1. The ad is “seller focused”
2. The ad is misleading
3. The ad doesn’t prequalify

The ad text is seller centric

When people are making a decision on whether or not to go skydiving, they don’t care about how they pay.

When people are making a decision on where to go skydiving, they don’t care how they pay.

People care about things like how fun is it? How far away is the skydiving centre? How high do I jump from? How much is it?

The last thing people think about when booking a skydive is what payment method they are going to use.

Ads should be written to offer benefits to the customer. That is what grabs their attention. That is what grabs their interest. If you want branding, you’re in the wrong medium. In search, people are searching for something. If branding is what you’re looking for, go and get banner ads. (And that’s a topic for another post)

The ad text is misleading

After looking at that ad, how much do you think skydiving costs?

$130?

$150?

$200?

It’s actually $350-$400.

The special offer, “save $30 on orders over $129″ is completely accurate, yet the qualification is completely irrelevant. In a format where you’ve got 70 characters, why waste 1/4 of them? And considering the call to action in this ad is self indulgent, the whole bottom line is wasted.

The ad creates false impressions. Despite the landing page (which we’ll see in a minute), some people are going to get to the product page and be pissed off.

Instead, why don’t Paypal draw a connection between their offer and their service.

The ad text doesn’t prequalify

The first time I looked at this ad I thought “Wow, skydives for $139, that’s amazingly and rediculously cheap. Oh… and PayPal is an option”. It didn’t click with me that you have to pay with PayPal to get the special until I actually started writing this post. Maybe that’s just me.

We already talked about how skydives actually cost $350. If you know nothing about skydiving and you have a $200 budget for fathers day, you qualify via this ad and you click it.

Paypal have effectively created false positives. False positives are a terrible thing for Adwords ads.

So what should the ad text look like?

Something like, “Pay With PayPal And Save $30″ would sit a lot easier with me. Why? Well, we do have to keep in mind that PayPal don’t want to sell only skydiving, but that buyers have to also pay by PayPal. The ad won’t sell as many skydive’s as an ad that was run by a skydiving centre, but that’s not our objective here either. We need people to pay with PayPal.

The line “Pay With PayPal And Save $30″ promotes PayPal in a way that is buyer centric. It is telling the buyer what they can get from using Paypal, rather than just telling the buyer to pay with PayPal.

The line also pre-qualifies buyers. Now people that won’t use paypal, won’t click the ad.

I have some other tips for writing Adwords Ad Text.

The landing page

I go ahead and click the ad, and get taken to this page:

Paypal-Offers.com.au landing page

There are a few things immediately wrong with this landing page.

1. Where is the skydiving info?
2. There is no skydiving info?
3. Am I in the right browser tab?
4. There is no skydiving info?
5. Yep, there’s no skydiving info
6. Wait there’s a horizontal scroll here
7. Ok I’ve scrolled all the way to the left, and there’s no skydiving info. Maybe on the right?
8. Nope nothing on the right either
9. What the hell?
10. Seriously, am I in the right browser tab?
11. Oh wait, if I scroll to the left again there’s an option labelled “Experience”, and I can see a tiny picture of a plane. Skydivers jump from planes.

I got through to number 11 because I actually wanted to see this offer, but everyone else left the site at 1.

So what’s wrong with the landing page here?

1. The landing page is 99% full of other stuff
2. The 1% that is related to skydiving is a tiny picture of a plane that you pretty much have to have jumped out of to realise it. It’s also hidden and you have to scroll sidewards to find it.
3. There is no continuity between the ad and the landing page
4. This landing page is a Quality Score nightmare
5. The page is in flash and has a loading bar

Landing pages have to continue the story

With every sales process, with every beauracratic process, with pretty much everything. If you want to be persuasive, you have to paint a picture and tell a story.

Landing pages are no different. You have to continue on from the story you started with your ad. People coming to your page should have an idea of what to expect. They want information about skydiving. They want to know where, why, how, how much, is it safe, etc.

To get the sale, all you have to do is deliver on your story.

You’ve got the customers attention, now take advantage of it. The AIDA marketing model is used to describe the stages a customer goes through when considering a purchase. It goes Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. You’ve got the customer’s attention when they came to your site. Now keep them interested and use your landing page to create Desire and Action. It’s actually pretty easy since they’re looking for what you’re offering. They just searched for you, didn’t they?

My free advice to Paypal

So my advice to PayPal is pretty simple.

Create some new ads and test them against each other. Continually improve them.

Be more specific in targeting ads. Yes, the entire campaign is a broad one. But the savings across the board will be massive if each group is optimized.

Continue the story on the landing page.

And I wouldn’t be worth anything as an optimiser if I didn’t say, “continually test and improve”.

Related posts:

• Google Adwords Quality Score Explained
• 6 Adwords Landing Page Design Tips and an Example
• The 10 most expensive Adwords Mistakes
• How I got 250% more leads 466% cheaper
• 5 tips for writing Adwords Ads