When running a PPC campaign it is a known fact that the quality of the ad is critical. A good ad will deliver better click through rates, cheaper clicks, more conversions, and will also teach you about what your customers want from you. However, ad text testing is actually quite a difficult aspect of AdWords optimisation. This article explains how Search Laboratory’s scientific approach and systems ensure that your profit is maximised through statistical ad text testing
The PPC manager needs to look at the ads and assess which, within a certain ad group, is performing the best. But how should this be judged? Looking at click through rate is the standard procedure, and is the statistic that provides the most data for us to judge – so it’s easier. However, click through rate is a measure of how many clicks you get per search, and therefore how much money Google earns per search.
We really need to know how much money you earn per search from individual ads. We have seen time and time again that ads with higher click through rates are actually less profitable because they attract every casual clicker, rather than qualifying those ready to buy.
However, profit per ad is not easily measurable in AdWords
We then have the problem of how to judge when we have enough data. Imagine you have an ad that has been running and doing well for some time, and you are testing it against a new ad that has been running for a week. Also, let’s keep things easy by judging the ads on their click through rate. You may get the following numbers to analyse:
| Adverts | Impressions | Clicks | Click Through Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ad 1 | 100,000 | 500 | 5% |
| Ad 2 | 100 | 8 | 8% |
Is Ad 2 any better than Ad 1?
You need to consider the sample sizes of 100 impressions and 8 clicks and whether this is big enough to be sure that this ad is outperforming the existing ad.
To be sure, we need to perform a statistical test. All this is now getting hard, and we are only looking at one ad pair when we could have hundreds in a campaign, with some ad groups having more ads than two under test.
What generally happens is that the PPC manager will do one of two things:
- Use gut feel. Have a quick look at the ads and guess
- Not bother. All this is too hard, my ads are not bad so I’ll leave them and check back once every six months or so.
At Search Laboratory we do not leave any of this to chance. Ads are critical and they can make huge differences to your campaign. We have software that downloads all the click and conversion statistics automatically and then presents the campaign manager with a simple interface that highlights in red all the ads where one is outperforming the other. To do this it uses a statistical significance test so the PPC manager can be sure that there is no guesswork involved. The system can analyse click through rate, conversion rate, but also the more important statistic of profit per ad.
If you are a Search Laboratory customer then your ads will already be analysed frequently using this system. If not, call us now and start to maximise your ads, and profit with highly analytical AdWords optimisation.
For more information Contact Search Laboratory.
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