It’s happening more and more on social news sites like Digg and even Sphinn. People are using sensationalized or completely misleading headlines just to get people to click on their links (or just to get votes). I’ve seen it on Digg, Fox is notorious for using it, and CNN is even doing it today. It’s gotten to the point where it seems like I’m reading the National Enquirer rather than a legitimate source of information. So What does all of this have to do with paid search?
The principal is the same. If you overpromise and underdeliver or worse yet, completely mislead a user and don’t deliver at all, you will be getting traffic but you won’t be getting good traffic. It can also be good to increase your CTR and thus quality score, but in the end you won’t be as successful as the advertisers who are using accurate and relevant ad copy with landing pages that truly support their claims. Taking a couple of easy examples:
Eventually, just like banners, people start overlooking these types of ads the moment they see them. I know that personally, if I see an ad that sounds too salesy or sounds too good to be true, I’ll usually just skip it over. I used to be an avid Digg reader (prior to the influx of marketers) but have noticed that the quality of the content has gone way down and people are doing whatever they can to get to the front page.
Tactics like these are very short term. They may work a bit in the beginning, but there is no long term value in them. In the end, you’ll spend more time having to either start from scratch or become more and more outrageous in your claims to keep getting any results and you’ll be missing out on repeat visitors and conversions in the process.
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