Marketers have long used incentives to get their target audience to take action. With print ads, that may be some give away to get the reader into a store. With direct mail, perhaps free shipping to get the recipient to pick up the phone and place an order.

For e-marketing campaigns, white papers are an excellent and frequently used vehicle to get a web site visitor to fill out a form. E-mail marketers often use the promise of a topically focused white paper to incent the reader to click through to their web site where their offering - and white paper - can be presented more fully.

A Question of Real Estate
But can a white paper be effectively used in a Google AdWords paid search (often called “pay-per-click”) campaign ad? Can it drive click-throughs when ad messaging real estate is so tight; 25 characters for a title plus two 35-character lines of text, to be exact? We decided to put this question to the test in 2005 for one of our clients.

The Test
Here’s the test setup. For an AdWords campaign promoting wireless hardware and software technology, we added ads which differed from the originals in but a single way, the inclusion of “Whitepapers.” at the end of the ad. In some cases, the inclusion replaced an existing word or two of ad text, in others, it was additive.

A modified ad was run simultaneously against both its non-modified base ad as well as other ads currently running in each of five Google ad groups. Unlike Yahoo’s paid search program, Google’s AdWords conveniently offers automatic ad rotation within an ad group. This makes it a snap to test and tune ads to improve click-through performance.

The test ran for the bulk of 2005 in a campaign that was generating over half a million ad impressions and more than 2,000 clicks (visitors) per month. The results were enlightening and ran the gamut from exceptional to “think again”.