Perhaps one of the most valuable features of online marketing is the ability to test and measure the effectiveness of your efforts much faster than traditional marketing methods. This also means that the refinement cycle is a lot shorter, if you take advantage of it.
Even if you are an experienced business owner, there is a big difference between thinking what works, and knowing what works for your offerings. Today we’re going to test the options available to you when split-testing your ad copy in AdWords and, in our opinion, how to go about it effectively.
Split-testing your ad copy is a worthwhile endeavour. Done properly, you can determine what copy appeals to your consumer-base the most. You can also test special offers against each other and discover which is more valuable. This information can be extrapolated out and used throughout the rest of your marketing efforts, both online and offline.
How Many Ads Should I Test?
I see a variety of figures bandied about when campaign managers speak of split-testing ad copy. It comes down to a variety of factors, the most important of which is how quickly your campaign gains impressions. When split-testing, we declare an ad the victor when both ads have reached around 1,000 impressions (you might like to wait longer to be certain). If your campaign gets thousands of impressions per day (we’re speaking of the search network) you might test 5 or 6 ads against each other. There is no point split-testing that number of ads if it is going to take ages for your campaign to gain enough impressions to provide an answer.
Regardless of the above, I normally just split-test two ads against each other in each ad group. It makes it easier to keep track of for my poor brain.
Ad Rotation Settings
These settings provide the means with which you can test AdWords ad copy against each other and how the AdWords platform determines the frequency when each ad shows. They can be found under the Settings tab when you select a particular campaign within your AdWords Account. And here is what they look like (from a fresh campaign being set-up, so we haven’t set up the conversion tracking as yet):
I will go into detail and explain each of the options and our thoughts on them.
1. Optimize For Clicks
This is the default setting when you first create a campaign. Google will promote the ads expected to garner more clicks more often into the ad auction than other ads in the ad group. These ads gain more impressions than other ads in the ad group, resulting in higher ad served percentages. According to Google, by using this option, your ad group will likely receive more impressions and clicks overall, since higher-quality ads achieve better positions and attract more user attention.
2. Optimize For Conversions
Ads expected to provide more conversions are delivered more often into the ad auction than other ads in the ad group. If there isn’t sufficient conversion data to determine which ad will provide the most conversions, ads will rotate using ‘Optimize for clicks’ data. According to Google, by using this option, your ad group might receive fewer clicks than if it were optimized for clicks, but it’s expected to receive more conversions, resulting in an improved ROI.
3. Rotate
Rotated ad serving delivers ads more evenly into the auction, even when one ad has a lower CTR than another. The impression statistics and ad served percentages of the ads in the ad group will be more similar to each other than if you select one of the optimization options. However, these statistics still may differ from each other, as ad position can vary based on Quality Score.
This option is my preferred choice. Although the other options are valuable for less hands-on management, exercising manual control over your ad copy and the rate at which they are displayed against each other makes it much easer to determine what is working and what is not.
What Ad Copy Should I Test?
The answer is anything and everything but only ever one thing at a time. If you truly want to know what is working and what is not, you cannot test multiple things in the same ad.
I recommend following the best ad copy principles found in our other articles, and switching around one thing for the second ad. Perhaps it might be a different call to action, maybe a different feature or benefit or maybe even a special offer.
Here is an example:
Anyhow, you get the idea. Go split-test stuff.