With Black Friday and Cyber Monday coming up, I thought I’d share a nifty trick you can use to boost your PPC click rates.

It’s “countdown ads” and they look like this:Battersea Kayak Shack

www.example.com
20% off tandem kayaks!
Sale ends in 3 hours

That last bit is the countdown. You tell Google what time your sale will end and it does the rest.

When you write the ad, you format it like this:Battersea Kayak Shack

www.example.com
20% off tandem kayaks!
Sale ends in {=COUNTDOWN(“2017/11/11 23:59:00”)}

How well do they work?

Tests run by Matt Umbro showed countdown ads…

(A) Got a 40% higher click rate than statics ads that mentioned the same sale and end date.

(B) Brought in visitors that were 67% more likely to buy.

The combination of these two things – 40% more visitors plus 67% higher conversion rate – would mean a 134% increase in sales.

(Obviously, individual mileage will vary.)

So it looks like the ads do a good job of tapping into the power of scarcity. And, if you’re running sales next month, try them for yourself.

Steve Gibson

PS Adwords has a lot of nifty features like this that pros like me use to run rings around badly-managed accounts.

You can keep up to date on them by regularly reading Google’s Adwords blog:

https://blog.google/products/ads/

Or, alternatively, save yourself a lot of work – and get better results – by hiring someone like me.