The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

Ehren Reilly, a key contributor to Clickable's ActEngine, wrote a best practice on ad testing within AdWords. We wanted to share it with you below. Ehren soon will begin making personal appearances on the Official Clickable Blog.

Testing Your Text Ads in Google AdWords. 

There are many ways to test ad variations in Google AdWords.  This post describes one of my favorite methods for getting the best ad possible. 

When creating text ads at the beginning of a campaign you should try out two very different ads.  To make sure you have a fair comparison, select "rotate evenly" in your ad group settings so that both ads will be displayed about the same number of times a day. As we move along in the process we'll test more precise variations, but, for now, we want to a very basic idea of what drives conversions.

Once you have a significant number of clicks on your ads, you will likely have two very different sets of statistics for those ads, on everything from CTR (Click-Through Rate) to Clicks, Conversions, etc.  If the difference in performance isn't all that significant, you may want to try starting the process over: delete the poorer performing of the two ads and again try a completely different ad. On the other hand, if the performance difference between the two ads is significant, delete the poorer performing ad and create a new ad based off of the better performer.  However, instead of trying a completely different ad this time, just change one thing that you would like to test: the headline text, for instance, or a single word in one of the description fields. By limiting the number of changes in your ads, you can determine exactly what is working and what isn't. (Our "Create Ad Variations" tool helps you do this by generating up to 8 ads using different options that you give us for headline and description fields.)

The process of improving ads should be a science, not a guessing game. By making sure you are systematically eliminating things which decrease the performance of your ad, you can know what is causing your success.

One of the first things we discussed on this blog was the importance of testing your ad copy . The slightest

One of the first things we discussed on this blog was the importance of testing your ad copy . The slightest