I call Pay Per Click (PPC) writing “Haiku for Dollars.” Mostly becuase I think it’s funny, and people laugh so I assume they agree. But PPC isn’t much of a creative strain — unlike most creative endeavors in which a broad base of life experience helps you connect concepts in bizarre ways, PPC tends to be as surprising a corn-fed blonde making the finals of American Idol. Or so I thought. And then realized, as usual, I was right the first time.
I’ll explain in a very long-winded fashion.
So with PPC, you have certain words (keywords, or search terms) that you gotta squeeze into tiny little character counts (25 character headlines, and two lines of 35 characters). And you’ve got to put the selling point in there, and do it in a way that it differentiates you from all the other crap PPC ads offered by the loyal opposition and noble competitors.
But you knew that. You probably also know about negative keywords. No? Well, it’s simple. Say you’re writing about a hybrid air-conditioner. You don’t want a guy searching for a new Toyota Prius to click on your ad, so you tell Google to NOT display your ad when someone searches for “hybrid car with air conditioner.” Because you don’t want to pay for that dirty, unqualified hippy to click your ad.
Clear?
So I’m writing a bunch of PPC ads about laminated veneer lumber a while back. (Laminated veneer lumber? Think of plywood stacked a foot thick then cut like a beam. Sorta. Anyway, it’s strong “engineered wood” used in home construction.) And in our list of negative keywords, I see WoW and “World of Warcraft.”
“What the hell?”
Well, laminated veneer lumber is known in the construction industry as LVL. And apparently, in the World of Warcraft, lvl is shorthand for “level.” So we don’t want some 42-year-old ubergeek searching for “lvl 60 druid” to get our ad. Because after all, everyone knows that searcher lives in his mom’s basement, only uses a hammer when his +9 crossbow of wounding has run out of magic arrows, and would be a throw-away click. There’s twenty-five cents the client will never see again.
Anyhoo. The point? Well, I assumed that someone on our team KNEW this shockingly geeky information about World of Warcraft and snuck it into our project. “Who put this Warcraft crap in my spreadsheet?” I bellowed like a lvl 30 orc. Because that kind of geekery cannot go un-teased.
But it turns out, Google somehow provides that list of negative keywords.
That’s it. That was entirely the point.
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In other PPC-related news, I have an amusing tic that surfaces while writing PPC: flinching. Character counts matter, right? I can’t count characters as I write, but I have a sense for when a line’s getting too long. And as I get near the end of that suspicious line, I make a pained face and cringe like the word count button is going to bite me if I go over. It’s like gambling. “C’mon, baby! Be 35! 35! Let’s go! AWWWWWW, craps. Thirty seven. Shoot.”
And you thought copywriting was boring…