Boost Google AdWords CTR with subdirectories and subdomains
As you may or may not know, we are big fans of Perry Marshall. His AdWords tips and techniques are excellent and usually fall into the category of “why didn’t I think of that?!”
His latest newsletter has a neat, quick little tip that we wanted to pass along. As recently as a couple of years ago, instead of having your URL in your Google ad read as www.largemediainc.com, you could make it LargeMediaInc.com. That reads much better and would instantly improve your click-through-rate (CTR).
But, Google changed that not too long ago and you can’t do it anymore. We’re all stuck with www….or are we?
This is from Perry’s newsletter and it lays out how you can improve your URL by using subdirectories and subdomains:
Phil Wilson is an attorney who helps companies deal with unions. He’s the #1 guy in that space. His website is www.lrionline.com – not the sexiest domain in the world. But what clever things can he do with it?
1) SUBDIRECTORY – he can make all kinds of clever copy moves, like
www.lrionline.com/MichiganRuling
or
www.lrionline.com/FightTheUnion
or
www.lrionline.com/EarlyWarningSignsRemember, anything you don’t have room for in the ad itself, you can work into your domain name somehow. You make a directory on your server and redirect it. You can do this with WordPress as well.
2) SUBDOMAIN – VERY few people do this:
MichiganRuling.lrionline.com
or
FightTheUnion.lrionline.com
or
EarlyWarningSigns.lrionline.com3) You can use both:
FightTheUnion.lrionline.com/MichiganRuling
Also…
Google forces domain names to www. and lowercase, so Phil can’t even do LRIonline.com which looks a lot better. But Google has to respect the capitalization of subdomains and subdirectories because some servers are case sensitive.
This is a brilliant way to add keywords into your ads and change your capitalization to help it pop. This will most certainly increase your CTR and we can’t wait to play around with it.
