PPC Ads Appealing to the Intuitive Mind Pays Off !

In the world of Paid Search, when we create advertisements to fit the limited space on the SERP, we sometimes fall short of reaching the emotions of our customers. We pack our PPC ad copies with what we know as the best practices, like price-points and offer descriptions, and often come up short of giving our ads strong emotional appeal.

As new age advertisers, we tend to believe that present day customers rarely make decisions based on emotions, which are seen as irrational and irresponsible. However, psychologists and behavioural economists have proven that emotional decisions still have a strong backing of a logical framework. In fact, emotion-based decisions could even be seen as more reliable, as the subconscious can process more pieces of information at once than the conscious mind can!

In his HBR article, Michael D. Harris, the CEO of Insight Demand, talks about the Iowa Gambling Study conducted by the University of Iowa, which highlights how effective the emotional brain actually is at figuring out the probability of success for maximum gain. The experiment was basically a card game using two decks of cards. One “risky” deck gave high payouts, but also a chance of no winnings, while the “safe” deck ensured consistent wins, but with lower payouts. The participants were not told which one of the decks was risky or safe before the experiment.

This study found that in spite of identifying the risky deck after just drawing 10 cards, participants continued to draw cards from them until drawing about their 80th card. The logical choice would have been to avoid the risky deck and draw consistently from the safer one, but logic was beaten by intuition, as the participants were willing to take greater risks to maximize their gains. The study found that intuition is fast and effortless, while logic needs time and preciseness.

Michael concludes the same article by saying that for complex sales that involve multiple data points, marketers should appeal to the intuition of consumers, as intuition processes more information faster, as shown by the above study.

Here at NetElixir, we made a similar observation while testing multiple ad copies for a digestive care product manufacturer. We were competing with popular retailers who offered greater discounts for the same products on the SERP. In this case, a buyer may not make a quick purchase decision, as there are various pricing attributes to be checked, making the purchase latency comparatively higher.

Our ad copy experiment statistics agree with Michael’s observations from his study. The ad copies appealing to the emotions of the customer were more successful than the ones with just price-points and offer descriptions. Here’s what we found:

Overall, we found that if you want to create winning pay-per-click ads, appealing to the emotions of the consumer is the way to get the big payouts!