At the beginning of February I posted about a Google AdWords regionalised ad text experiment I had been carrying out. At the time I had just began monitoring the performance of two very similar ads, the only difference being the TLD (Top Level Domain) of the display URL. The first ad’s URL was www.seoptimise.com, with the second ad using www.seoptimise.co.uk, the destination URL’s were exactly the same.

The campaign was only targeted to the UK and because of this I didn’t expect users to pay too much attention to the TLD and anticipated very similar results from both ad variations.

.com Ad Percentage Increases:
Conversion Rate: 34.75%
CTR: 32.26%
Cost Per Conversion: 25.97%

The screenshot above shows that while there wasn’t a massive difference between the figures for both ads, the .com ad outperforms the .co.uk version in CTR, conversion rate and cost per conversion, showing a £1 saving from each conversion! I found this interesting because the campaign was geo-targeted specifically to the UK only, but in this case it seems that UK users have more trust in clicking the .com ad more than they would a .co.uk TLD to find what they are looking for.

I may test this further over the next couple of weeks by targeting additional countries such as the US and Australia to see if the difference in performance increases further for the .com ad as would be expected.

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Kevin Gibbons is Founder/Director of Strategy at SEOptimise. Kevin is well known within the search industry as a blogger for sites such as Search Engine Land, Econsultancy and Search Engine Watch. Kevin is also a frequent SEO speaker at a number of conferences including Search Marketing Expo (SMX), Search Engine Strategies (SES), a4uexpo, SAScon and BrightonSEO.