The time has come for me to reveal a 2 year long secret…I have been cheating in AdWords! I found a loophole in ad copy restrictions that has allowed me to write a select number of ads with an arrow ⇒ in the copy! It has boosted CTR over nearly every ad I ever put it up against. You will see up to a ~15% CTR boost.
The trick is to use Special ASCII HTML Character Codes to make the arrow. You can find the code on an ASCII site or just copy this ⇒ and never lose it. You simply past this into your ad copy and away you go; boosted CTRs in most cases. Who in their right mind wouldn’t want an arrow pointing to their CTA or their value prop? It grabs the eye and pushes it into your next statement. It’s a glorious thing.
Current Appearance in Google
Previous Appearance in Google
I have run into a few approval issues in the past, so you have to use it wisely. I like to put it in established campaigns that have never had an approval issue. Maybe it’s me being superstitious, but that has slipped it past the approval a lot easier. The trick is simple, but use it wisely. You don’t want every ad out there with arrows, otherwise the differentiator is null.
In the past few years of using this with about 5 different clients, I have seen anywhere from 8-14% lift in CTR versus the same copy without the arrow. Traditionally, in place of the arrow would be a period, comma, plus sign, or hyphen. The arrow took all of them down.
So why am I revealing my ultimate secret now? Short answer: Because I left the agency life for corporate. Longer answer: Because I can’t risk having an ad disapproved by legal at my new job, and we actually have Google reps that care about us and look at our accounts. Weekly calls and near daily communication with our Google reps doesn’t leave me much room to do things like this anymore. So I figured I would share the love with my agency and freelance friends out there. The worst that can happen is you get your ad disapproved. The upside is you get a good CTR and your ads look and perform better than your competition.
*There is a good chance that a Google rep will read this and could put in a note to their engineers to fix this, but hopefully not. I think it’s a harmless loophole in their system. And you should be rewarded for finding it. And you should definitely be rewarded for reading this post! Thank you.
Happy bidding, everyone!