A/B Split testing your Google Ads
25th May 2006
|
You can use Google for A/B Split testing your Ad creative. You’ll need to go into Campaign Settings, and make sure the radio button “Rotate: Show all ads equally� is checked. Otherwise, if you have checked “Optimize: Show better-performing ads more often�, Google will serve your Ads with the highest CTR more often. You can be relatively sure that your ads will be served almost equally during the same time periods. But, because one of the ads could be held in editorial review, you should make certain that all your ads are running, before you begin testing. A good way to insure the ads get approved is to have your keywords or claims on the landing pages. Start by creating 4 to 6 ads per adgroup. This way you can very quickly weed out the poor performing ads. And, you’ll get a chance to refine the remaining ads with higher CTR’s. Things to Test:
Don’t just optimize for CTR. You’ll want to optimize based on ROI. Well, that actually depends on your campaign objectives. Because, if it’s brand awareness you want, then high CTR is most likely the key metric. And, at that point, you can turn down your bids, because Google rewards high CTR with a higher Quality Score. So, it’s very possible that your ROI won’t suffer. But, I digress. Sticking to the point, most advertisers will want to optimize for ROI ( actually ROAS ). So, you’ll need tracking code on those destination URL’s. The tracking code will look something like this: This will enable you to track by ads. A more sophisticated way to track is by keyword and ads. A good third party bid management platform like AtlasOnePoint has this capability. When creating your ads, remember to stick to Google’s Editorial Guidelines. No related posts. |
May 25th, 2006 at
Another testing idea: try including the keywords in your creative vs. not including them. It seems counter-intuitive, but as always the only way to truly know is to test!
-Dave
May 27th, 2006 at
Shimon,
Your list on ‘things to test’ is very helpful as it will help form a checklist ad writers can use to make sure all angles are considered.
Testing ad creatives with A/B split testing is a very rewarding exercise when you can test all the way to the final conversion.
Here is an article we wrote about using Google Analytics to Measure Google AdWords Ad Creative using A/B Split Tests: http://www.roirevolution.com/blog/2006/03/how_to_use_google_analytics_to_measure_google_adwo_1.html
We use this system to make decisions about creatives beyond CTR and it has proved very helpful.
Keep up the great posts!
-Timothy