Your ad copy is often where a customer experiences their first impression of your business.
What happens if those critical words are misspelled?
According to this extensive study by the team at Website Planet, you can expect to pay 10-20% more for clicks than other advertisers (depending on geography).
You could also see 70% fewer clicks than your competitors.
Which makes sense! Typos and misspelled words, especially in an ad headline, look unprofessional. Sometimes, they make your product look like malware. Overall, it’s a poor first impression that erodes trust.
Potential customers look at your storefront as a reflection of what using your software or product will be like. If the experience starts off with poor attention to detail, their faith in how you’ll attend to their needs as they use the tools is quickly demolished.
In the digital world, typos are often dismissed as inevitable. They sneak into texts, tweets, and sometimes, our website copy. But how do these little blunders affect the way potential customers interact with ads and landing pages? The folks at Website Planet were curious and decided to put spelling and grammar under the microscope. Let’s dive into the study. What they found was both surprising and enlightening.
They kicked off their investigation with a set of hypotheses. They figured that a typo in an ad might turn users off, leading to a dip in the click-through rate. Similarly, a typo-ridden landing page might not sit well with visitors, possibly causing a spike in the bounce rate.
So, they rolled up their sleeves and set up some A/B tests for Google ads and landing pages. They crafted three variants of an ad; one clean, one with a moderate typo, and another with an extreme typo. They also whipped up two landing pages; one typo-free and the other generously sprinkled with errors.
Now, the results?
First off, the typo-infested ads saw a decrease in clicks by up to 70% compared to the clean ad. And here’s the kicker, the geography mattered. In native English-speaking regions like the US and the UK, the clean ad won the day. But in India, an ad with a grammatical mistake unexpectedly took the lead. When it came to the cost, typos weren’t so forgiving. In the US, a typo could cost up to 10% more, while in the UK, the penalty for typos soared to 20% and a whopping 72% for grammatical errors.
Shifting the lens to the landing pages, the typo-laden page saw an 85% increase in bounce rate and an 8% reduction in time spent on the site. Despite a popular belief (backed by a Cambridge University study) that the order of letters in a word doesn’t matter much as long as the first and last letters are right, typos turned out to be quite the party poopers.
The takeaway? Good grammar isn’t just the hallmark of good communication; it’s a business imperative. Whether it’s the ad that introduces people to your brand or the landing page that welcomes them, a typo could be the difference between a bounce and a conversion. So, the next time you shrug off that typo, remember, it might just cost you a click, or worse, a customer1.