Every online advert has a scent, some scents lead the prospect to the intended outcome, while other scents route them in the wrong direction and they end up doing something you didn’t want.
In today’s article I’m going to reveal why most online adverts fail, and how you can avoid making the same mistakes by understanding the scent of your ads.
Online adverts are stories
When serving an advert your goal is for the prospect to click your advert and land on your website (usually). Once on your website they may have to go through further pages before converting. For example, selecting the product, entering in their billing information and confirming their order.
At every click they have an option, to carry on going forward or leave. If your ad funnel has a strong scent they will keep going forward, but if the scent is lost or changed, they will return to the start.
Here’s 3 tips to keeping your ad scent strong.
1. Design scent
When directing a prospect from an online advert to a landing page, the copy, images, tone, colors and value proposition must be almost identical on both your advert and landing page.
When a prospect clicks on your advert they have already read the first chapter of your story, the landing page must echo the same message to keep the scent strong else you run the risk of them losing your scent.
Here’s Booking.com AdWords advert on YouTube showing me a number of hotels to choose:
After clicking on their advert, I am redirected to the exact hotel of the link I clicked:
The name, price, pictures, wording and colors are all the same. The scent of this advert is strong, I’m several times more likely to make the intended action than if they sent me to the homepage or showed me a hotel that wasn’t on the list.
2. Benefits scent
Prospects click your ads because they feel they will benefit from the product or service you’re offering. Whatever benefit you claimed in your ad copy must also be echoed again on your landing page.
Take Farecompare for example, their Facebook advert tells me that they compare billions of fares online to find me the best price:
After clicking on their advert I am sent to their landing page where they emphasize that they have helped 36 million travellers save money:
The benefit listed on the advert is more or less identical to the one on their homepage. Again the scent is strong and I’m much more likely to use their search feature than if they didn’t mention the fact they helped 36 million travelers save money.
Who wouldn’t like to save more money flying? I know I would.
3. Offer scent
Of all the three scents, the offer scent is the most important to keep consistent. If you’ve stated you’re giving something away for free, you must mention it over and over again for each step the prospect has to take.
Take HubSpot‘s Facebook advert about their CRM tool, the advert states that it’s 100% free forever:
Upon clicking their advert they state once more that the service is 100% free:
After clicking their call-to-action, I’m told to sign up and once again they mention the offer (100% free forever):
In their 3-step signup process they never lost the offer and repeated it over and over again.
Imagine if on the landing page they told you it cost $9.99 or that it’s only free for 30 days. The scent would be totally lost and you’d go back to reading your newsfeed.
Summary
Think of all your adverts as a story. Each chapter must relate to the one before else you’ll lose the prospect. A/B testing adverts and audiences is all well and good, but if your ads are losing their scent once on prospects get to the landing page, all that hard work would have been for nothing.
How do your online ads smell?
Nick Bridges
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