Including Prices in AdWords Ads to Boost ROI

Why don’t more sellers include pricing in their AdWords ads? Ads in virtually every other marketing medium (billboards, magazine ads, TV/radio, catalogues, store displays) include pricing prominently, yet price-inclusion is by far the exception in PPC advertising. Why is that? Could including ads boost your campaigns?

At the most basic level, including a price in your AdWords ad can do one of two things:

• A: Boost Clickthrough
• B: Reduce Clickthrough

In my experience, ‘B’ is by far the most likely outcome: Including product pricing in your AdWords ads will reduce the number of viewers that click through & hit your site. On the surface that sounds like a bad thing, but there are a few factors to consider before discounting the idea completely.

Why would CTR reduce?

First off - why do clicks go down when the price is included? Well, why do people click your ad in the first place? They click to find out what’s behind the ad. If you’re advertising a product, the primary information a potential buyer is looking for is generally:

1. Brand (yours)
2. Brand (product)
3. Benefits
4. Features
5. Price
6. Stock/Delivery Info

Some of those will be included in your ad, some won’t. The clicks you lose by including pricing in your ads are the clicks you would have got from people looking to find out the price. ie. by including the price, you’re cutting out a significant number of people who are buying largely on price. Price-based buyers (people for whom item ‘5′ in the above list is currently the primary purchasing consideration) generally fall into the following category:

• They’re looking for the lowest price possible
• They’ll click on several ads to compare prices
• No matter how good your landing page/copy/sales funnel is, if your price isn’t right, they’re not going to buy

Higher Quality Traffic

That being the case, including your price up-front can actually be a good thing: clicks have gone down, but a big chunk those clicks were never going to convert anyway. What you’re left with is higher-quality traffic; traffic that’s more likely to convert into sales, thus increasing your ROI.

What About The Quality Score?

However, something you should be aware of if ad positioning is important to you (ie. do you want to retain the top spot? top 5?) , is that knocking down your CTR may knock down your ad positioning. ClickThrough Rate is one of the primary factors in the AdWords Quality Score, meaning that - all things being equal - if you include a price in your ad & (due to putting off price-based bidders) a smaller percentage of your ad viewers click through your ad than they do your main competitors’ ads, you will drop down the listing & they will rise.

What if You Do Have The Best Price?

If you do have the most competitive price, including it in your ad can be an all-round winner: If every other item in the buyer-consideration list (Brand, Benefits, Features, Stock, etc) is equal to your competitors & you put it all up front in your ad, then you’ll capture more clicks (boosting your ad position via the Quality Score) and those clicks will convert as well (if not better) than your competitors.