The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

Last week, we discussed a copywriting best practice that helps improve Click-Through Rate (CTR) in almost every case: properly capitalizing your ad copy. In most cases, however, you won’t know what works until you test variations of your ad copy. Building multiple versions of your ads and determining what works - and what doesn’t, can be time-consuming and complex, but Clickable’s Manage section and ActEngine make it quick and simple.

The first thing you need to do is launch Clickable’s “Create Ad Copy Variations” wizard. There are two places where you can do this. One is the ActEngine. In cases where an ad has a low CTR for its ad group, the ActEngine may recommend that you create variations of that ad. You can also launch the wizard directly in the Manage Ad Group section. At the top of the “Ads” Grid, you’ll see a link to Create “Text Ad Variations.” Click on it to launch the wizard.



You can either start creating variations right away, or you can use one of two helpful starting points: the best-performing ad in your ad group, or the best performing competitive ads for a keyword in your ad group.

At the top-left of the wizard, you can see the best-performing ad in your ad group. If you want to use it as your starting point, check the box beside “Pre Populate Ad A with reference ad copy.” Click “OK” and the first set of headline and description fields will be pre-populated with the headline and description of your best-performing ad.

You can also see the top-performing competitive ads for a keyword. At the top-right of the wizard, there’s a drop-down menu listing the keywords in your ad group. Just select any of those keywords, and the top-performing ads for that keyword will appear along the right side of the wizard.



The next step is to input alternative headline and description fields. (There are two description lines in Google AdWords ads, but only one longer field for Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter ads.) The display and destination URLs will be the same for all variations.



As you add headline and description fields, the “Ad Variations Matrix” will populate with all possible variations - that is, with every combination of headline and description fields possible based on your entries. (The maximum will be eight variations for Google, and four for Yahoo and MSN.) Click the checkbox beside the ads you’d like to test, and then click “SAVE!” at the lower-right to create your variations. (All of the ads will be selected by default.)



Now that you’ve created your variations, it’s time to test them. Right? Figuring out which variations have the highest CTR; which ones convert and which ones don’t; which ones meet your goals, and which fall short? Yes, all of these things do need to get done, but you don’t need to do them. No spreadsheet analysis; no tedious mathematical model. Why not? Because the ActEngine will be doing it for you. We’ll identify the ads that are under-performing, the ones you should bid more or less on, and the ones that are, and are not, meeting your goals. What will you need to do from there? Nothing to worry about: the ActEngine will make it very clear on a case-by-case basis.