Ad History (built into your search results on SpyFu) makes it faster and easier to start with fully optimized ad copy on day 1.
This ad copy research tool serves up rich data, and it makes successful ad copy obvious. When a site uses its best-performing ad copy for its most competitive keywords, you can tell which ad copy gets the most clicks and conversions.
Testing and Evolving: Getting to Great Ad Copy
The new Ad History helps you see how an advertiser’s most successful ad copy evolved over time. Read more to see how the tool makes it clear where these advertisers have honed their message.
Before, looking at one ad at a time was helpful, but just one piece of the puzzle. One good piece of ad copy never tells you if they repeated that copy across other ads. It’s valuable to know what copy the domain is using. It’s even more valuable to know what they used most recently AND most often.
With that in mind, we made it our mission to build this feature so you could see how far one variation spreads across a domain’s ads over time. There is no hiding how much they rely on it.
The advertiser relies on its best copy because it gets more clicks and conversions. We’ve been saying these are a domain’s most successful keywords. With ad history, you’re seeing a domain’s most successful ad copy. It’s their go-to for effective messaging.
Finding the Strongest Ad Copy
The combination is the trick. Best keywords + Best ad copy. Finding this holy grail will propel you far beyond anything you could accomplish in running a few searches for current ads. Here’s why.
Let’s say you gather a few of your targeted keywords and snag the copy that pops up when you search them. Nice start, but here’s what you’ll miss.
Is this copy new, or has it been running for a while?
Are they using this copy on many of their keywords or just this one you happened to test?
And if they have thousands of keywords, thousands upon thousands, how will you ever know what variations they rely on most and what they’ve learned to avoid?
These are tough questions to tackle without a lot of time, patience, and eye strain. Without the answer, though, you’re taking your cue from an ad that might not be the best example of what connects with customers.
We found that literally highlighting repeated copy gave us a fast-track to the answer.
Let’s recap how Ad History turns a domain’s history into a blabbermouth. Its own ads become unmistakable answers about its strategy.
The longer a domain buys a keyword,
And the higher they rank on it vs. their other ads,
And the more the keyword costs,
…the more likely it is that it is a profitable keyword. We can figure out their most profitable keywords just from following their history.
Why Does it Work?
From years of following ads, here’s what we can say with confidence:
Sites won’t let weak ad copy run too long. They tweak and test it as they get closer to their conversion goals.
Google serves up the ad copy that’s most likely to get a higher click through rate.
Ads that have been updated over time are most likely using the most successful version to date.
Once a domain finds successful ad copy, they will put it to work across many of their keywords.
This new design saves you from sifting through a domain’s every keyword to find a dominant message. We’ll short cut that for you by highlighting the same ad copy across the keywords so you can spot patterns that reveal the effects of their ad copy optimization. Taken further, you can even tell how they structure their ad groups and see which copy works best from group to group.
Again, SpyFu’s 10+ years of history reveal more about a competitor’s current strategy. Strong copy repeats and grows. Weak tests get buried in the past. Try Ad History for a domain or for a keyword.