The joy of the Westcountry

[bunn]

I am running an advert for reconditioned Agas. Specifically, I am running 2 adverts, with very similar wording.

One ad includes the line : "Lovingly refurbished in Devon"

The other is otherwise identical, but replaces that line with the rather more clinical: "Refurbished by specialists"

The first ad has a respectable clickthrough rate of 3.55%, but the second has a woeful rate of just 0.89% (ie, only a very tiny percentage of people who had that ad displayed in their search results decided to click on it).

I cannot tell accurately where searchers come from (see previous post about geographical inexactitude of online systems) but I don't *think* they are all from Devon. Google thinks most of them are from London. So unless Google is totally screwed on geographic sensing (which is possible) for some reason far more people like their cookers to be 'Lovingly refurbished in Devon'.

I expected the first line to do better as it feels 'warmer', but such a margin is quite striking.

Comments

[jane-somebody.livejournal.com]

Yes, I was thinking the same thing, that the other obvious variation was the 'lovingly', which I suspect has a deep unconscious pull. The other thing I thought was that, if there were no other references to Britain/UK in either version, one thing 'Devon' does is situate the advert as relevant to someone in this country who wants an AGA. I know I tend to assume that the ads I see eg at the top of my Gmail are more likely to be for US than UK sites, just because of the demographic weight - but actually, I don't know if this is true; Google might be targetting geographically better than I assume. A 'localising' word like Devon might well stand out and make me notice the ad? (Of course, if the whole ad starts off "WANT A BRITISH AGA?" my theory is worthless ;-))