I listened to a bunch of SEO podcasts yesterday and learnt something very interesting. The speaker, who’s name escapes me, is a Google Adwords expert. That’s what he does for a living.
The interesting thing he said that was the second most important element of a Google Adwords ad, next to the headline of course, is the domain name. Yes, the domain name.
He said in split tests a change in domain name can increase click-through by 300 – 400%. To the right is a graphic of the concept. The only text that changes is the domain name. After a few weeks of automatic ad rotations you would probably have enough data to work out which domain names pull best.
So the idea is if you rely on Adwords for most of your business, it may be worth your while investing in extra domain names to increase click-through rates. And for $15 per domain it’s a pretty good investment.
What you may think is the best domain name may not be what your customers think. Only testing will tell you. Which one of the ads in my example would you be inclined to click on? Please let me know by leaving a comment.