Do your paid ads suf­fer from low click-through rate syn­drome? It’s a tough dis­ease to stom­ach, but there are sev­er­al things you can do to intrigue peo­ple to click on your ads, vis­it your web­site, and con­vert into sales. By using a bit of psy­cho­log­i­cal intel­li­gence and data-proven tac­tics you can dras­ti­cal­ly increase your CTR’s, stop blend­ing in with the oth­er busi­ness­es try­ing to steal your clicks, and start grow­ing your rev­enue at a more sub­stan­tial rate.

“I want to get aver­age grades, have an aver­age job, and live an aver­age life.”

To clar­i­fy, the quote above is attrib­uted to no one, ever. Why? Because we don’t strive to be aver­age; we strive to be excel­lent. This should also be the case with your PPC ad copy, but all too often we’re set­tling for aver­age click-through-rates. But, what is an aver­age click-through rate?

At Word­Stream, we set out to find out by ana­lyz­ing over $3 bil­lion in spend across 100,000 AdWords accounts. Here’s what we found:

As one would expect, CTR drops as posi­tion on the page drops, but keep in mind these are aver­ages. So, how do you become above aver­age? Fol­low these three ad hacks to rise above the stan­dard CTR.

1. Appeal to Your Audience’s Emotions

Emo­tions impact what we buy. If you think back to your favorite ad cam­paign or even your most recent pur­chase, it was like­ly tied to an emo­tion.

For instance, I pur­chased a Siggi’s yogurt for break­fast this morn­ing because eat­ing break­fast makes me hap­py, and yogurt ties me back to my child­hood as it was a reg­u­lar sta­ple in my house­hold.

Why Siggi’s? Even though I’m spend­ing more than I would on Stony­field or Yoplait, Siggi’s prod­ucts are known for hav­ing far less sug­ar then the aver­age yogurt, zero arti­fi­cial addi­tives, and use milk that does not con­tain growth hor­mones. These all appeal to my emo­tion­al urge to keep my body strong and healthy.

What does this have to do with ad text? Your ads need to appeal to your user’s emo­tions to spur them to click.

Is it actu­al­ly pos­si­ble to awak­en emo­tions with strict char­ac­ter lim­its? It is, if you’re doing it right.

PPC leg­end Per­ry Mar­shall devised a hack that can work won­ders, called the “Swiss Army Knife,” which plots out dif­fer­ent enti­ties includ­ing your cus­tomer, some­thing your cus­tomer loves, some­thing they hate, their best friend, their worst ene­my, and you (the adver­tis­er):

Once these ele­ments are deter­mined you can devise an emo­tion­al­ly fueled ad like the one below.

The above ad achieved a CTR of greater than 30 per­cent!

You can see that in just a few lines of text, a rapid suc­ces­sion of emo­tions is awak­ened. From jeal­ousy and anger to sat­is­fac­tion and con­tent­ment, the ad spurs the jeal­ous wife to click in 30 per­cent of cir­cum­stances.

Pret­ty impres­sive con­sid­er­ing that the aver­age click-through rate is no high­er than 5 per­cent.

2. Spur Clicks Through Urgency

FOMO is an abbre­vi­a­tion for the “fear of miss­ing out,” and it’s a real thing. You’ve prob­a­bly expe­ri­enced it before.

Recent­ly, I was stuck at a con­fer­ence for work when my entire fam­i­ly was at the beach cel­e­brat­ing my nephew’s first birth­day. FOMO was in full force that day.

But how can we raise this fear in our audi­ence to entice them to click through to your land­ing pages? The eas­i­est and most effec­tive way is through ad cus­tomiz­ers.

Ad cus­tomiz­ers were released in Sep­tem­ber 2014, and they’re basi­cal­ly a way to put your ads on autopi­lot while keep­ing them up-to-date with sales, pro­mo­tions, spe­cial, or recur­ring events.

Just check out the exam­ple below, which shows how these ads auto­mat­i­cal­ly update as the sale is about to expire. This is an easy way to awak­en FOMO and push your shop­pers to pur­chase before it’s too late.

3. Use Numbers & Sales Incentives In The Headline

Did you know that the head­line of an ad is often the first thing (and some­times the only thing) a per­son reads before click­ing? When going through an analy­sis of ads with the high­est click-through rates (I’m talk­ing insane­ly high CTRs rang­ing from 40–60 per­cent!), I noticed two com­mon­al­i­ties among head­lines:

• Click­able head­line uti­lize num­bers.
• Sales and pro­mo­tions in the head­lines tend to do excep­tion­al­ly well.

Take the ad below, which has a 46.5 per­cent CTR, prov­ing that show­ing 30 per­cent in the head­line was quite com­pelling for searchers:

“Any­thing with num­bers works well! A per­cent­age off, a price point – it can’t just be ‘we have the best clothes,’ because everyone’s sell­ing the same thing,” said Jaclyn Jor­dan, WordStream’s senior paid search strate­gist. “I have clients sell­ing the same sham­poo and com­pet­ing with huge brands like Sepho­ra – com­pelling num­bers (for instance a low­er price point or a per­cent­age off) can help them stand out.”

Stop striv­ing for aver­age. Set you stan­dards far above, and use these hacks to get there!