I recently did a post about ad qualifiers and how to filter your traffic. I basically stated getting a high CTR for the sake of CTR is not always a good thing. That being said, there are times when you may want to increase your CTR on some of your campaigns.
Shock Advertising
Believe it or not, there is a practice in the marketing world known as shock advertising.
Shock advertising is a type of advertising generally regarded as one that “deliberately, rather than inadvertently, startles and offends its audience by violating norms for social values and personal ideals.
Moving this to paid search, you just need to include some unusual or shocking words in your ad title or text to draw attention. How many times have you searched for something, only to see over half of the ads basically state the same thing? Boring. Having your ad stand out from the rest of the crowd can get you those extra clicks. Using uncommon words can sometimes do the trick.
Common Examples
Below are just some of the words that I’ve seen used. There is really an endless list to choose from, they don’t necessarily have to shock, it just has to be unusual and different.
- Exposed
- Scam
- Naughty
- Sneaky
- Secrets
- Wicked
- Yucky
- Disgusting
- Gruesome
- Fatal
- Jealous
- Traitor …
The trick is incorporating them into your ad text. I’ve really seen some off the wall ones, and don’t even want to put them up here. This is just to get your mind going, how you use them is up to you.
Caveats
Again, like I’ve said in the past if your pay per click CTR goes from 2% to 5% but your sales or leads don’t increase along with it, those are wasted clicks, assuming your adwords quality score stays the same.
Also, if you put words like scam or exposed in your ad title, your landing page better do a good job explaining this. If the visitor clicks and sees nothing related to a scam or exposed, they might get frustrated and leave your site. Something to keep in mind, before you start injecting shock words into your ads.
All in all, it couldn’t hurt to test this out. Setup a unique lander for some of the words you have in mind and turn them on. You could be in for quite a shock 
Great article, Dave. (as always)
Tim