To understand why offering whitepapers as part of a Pay-per-Click strategy works, you’ll have to get inside Google’s head. Scary thought, I know, but surprisingly easy to do.

The first line on Google’s corporate site is: “Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Why do people use Google? The question is perhaps pedantic (though amusingly alliterative), it is important not to lose sight of the answer; people use Google to find things. Most often, they are looking for information –as Google themselves states. As such, offering Whitepapers front and center as part of your Google ads seems to fit in with the very philosophy of search – providing information and making it accessible.

Does it work? You bet. Here’s one of our ads that regularly achieves over a 4% click-through rate – a full 1% better than competing ads we’ve written not offering the download. (Note: the display link is different than the actual target landing page.)

Here are a few tips that I’ve learned the hard way through frustrating trial and error.

1. Create whitepaper ads for Ad Groups that contain obvious “information seeking” phrases – “compare”, “statistics”, etc…
2. Whitepapers are especially useful for Ad Groups of competitive keywords – but your copy needs to change.
3. Dynamic keyword insertion will drive up CTR, but could adversely affect conversion because of the possible disconnect between the search term and the actual content of the whitepaper.

One last thing – don’t forget to collect information before allowing the download. Someone who downloads a whitepaper from a PPC ad is at the beginning of the sales cycle and needs nurturing.

(image source)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Advertising, Marketing, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.