Why Make Your Ads UN-Clickable?

You have some good points there. Just don't forget that not only conversion rates matters - the volume is important too.

Let's say I've created a super tightly targeted campaign like you just described and I'm generating 1 conversion a day and my profit is 30$ per conversion on average. If I could get it up to 2 conversions a day even with just a 20$ profit per conversion on average, I would most likely do it because my daily profit would be bigger.

Lower conversion rates + higher amounts traffic can sometimes lead to higher total profit. So, I would say you still need a balance between relevance and clickability/attractiveness.

The point of advertising is to invite people to come to your store, even a strictly online store. Of course, that means an outlay of money.

The trick is to target your prospects correctly. In the old days, you would not put an ad in a sports magazine that is primarily geared to men (unless it's about women's sports) and advertise bras. You would just waste your money as it makes little sense. Same when doing it online.

So the first part is using the proper keywords for your product or service. Almost every one I talk to say they use the proper keywords but that is often not the case and a discussion for another thread.

The second part is having what I call clickable ads. You are saying to go against that which goes against getting the traffic you want. Most people want to get as much of it (but quality traffic) as possible.

The way I see it, you are not making your ads very good so fewer people will click. You are missing out on sales and profits of those who did not click. There may be quality clicks you do get but you I know you'd get more quality traffic with quality ads. The two go together. You are sacrificing getting quality traffic and your profits are suffering for it.

The other thing of course is that with a lesser quality ad, you get a lesser Quality Score, almost never a good thing. So your strategy has two strikes against you.

The third strike with such ads is that you learn nothing about how to attract people to your site nor what they may be really looking for and buy your product. This is something that not only you can apply to your paid advertising but also non-paid traffic. It may even help in improving your pages' conversion rates.

You seem to have the first part right with keywords. So right there, you are already qualifying prospects.

On your second point, I never was a fan of putting the price in the ad. It may work for some things but generally, people don't buy based solely on price. So don't have text ads mentioning price, that's what PLAs are for. You still need to give the searcher a reason to click the ad and buy, even on PLAs.

All the points you mention will help in making your ads unclickable. I see it all the time and I will rarely click these ads because they don't really talk to me, give me no reason to click and possibly buy from you.

If the mission is to not spend money, the more obvious solution would be not to use paid advertising. But I think you would do much better by making ads clickable in the first place, improving the whole sales funnel, not saving click bucks.

Your argument is to have a bad campaign just so you don't spend too much money. We assume a page conversion rate of 5%. You may spend $100 using your strategy and get 100 visitors which is 5 sales. But doing it my way, I could get 200 or more visitors for the same $100 spend which is a minimum of 10 sales. More sales and less advertising cost per sale which results in more profits.

Your landing pages are obviously doing the selling. You seem to have the keywords idea correct. You just need to improve your ads and get clicks on them. Trust me, you'll do much better instead of making them unclickable. You'll have more clicks, likely at lower cost and get more sales. Test different ads, with and without price and different hooks.

The CTR is irrelevant. I'm surprised you are getting 20% given that you are purposely making your ads unclickable. I believe it's because of laser-focusing the keywords, exactly what you should do. But you could get a 30% CTR or even more with better ads. That would be a 50% increase in sales, not bad either wouldn't you say?. So instead of making 10 sales per 100 clicks, you'd make 15. I'm also of the opinion that a good ad influences conversion rates. A 10% rate is great but a better ad could make it higher. So you would gain there too. You have the right idea with keywords, take it a notch higher with the ads.

The irony part of making your ads unattractive
is that it defeats the very purpose of saving cost.

A lower CTR will leads to higher Cost Per Click
and a lower visibility rate regardless the platform
you are in.

Rather than trying to optimize your ads, you can
try to find better keywords and set up a better lander;
both of which will lead to higher conversion rate and
provide higher profit margin for your campaign.

At the end of the day, ditching everything aside,
you want a higher ROI from your campaign.

Focusing on the smaller goals like trying to
make your ads unattractive is contradicting to
your bigger goal for attaining a higher profit margin
from your campaign.

While you would like 100% of your visitors to buy, that is unrealistic. The first step are keywords and using your example of “27W LED work light”, seems pretty clear right away what the searcher is looking for. Maybe a few negatives can be found but essentially, they are very likely looking to buy such a product.

I've heard the argument before that putting the price in the ad eliminates those wanting to pay less. The problem is that the searcher should have a good idea of the price range. This range is usually very small so that should not be an issue. Besides, most purchases are not done based on price.

Another problem is that you don't make your sales pitch to those who don't click the ad. One thing I know for sure, no click means no sale. You need to make your whole sales pitch on your page, not stop people from visiting in the first place.

You have a very good one in my opinion based on your conversions. Of all those searching and buying the product, many are buying from you. Attract more of them with better ads. Don't be afraid to try and let us know.