Properly Split Test Your Ads on AdWords
The purpose of split testing on AdWords is to always out perform your previous best ad. Doing so will lead you towards higher CTRs and lower bid costs. Now, the question becomes, how do you properly split test your ads?
Follow the process below and make sure that you are comparing apples to apples and not apples to oranges.
Once you have determined the winner from your 2 original ads (A and B), in this case A; what you want to do is then create 2 new ads, C and D.
Where ad C is the exact duplicate of the winning ad. And D is the new test ad that will be tested against your control ad (Ad C).
To start your new split test, just pause ads A and B and activate ads C and D.
You want to do it this way because, true split testing, means you are testing one variable that is different at a time e.g. Headline, Description Line 1 or 2, Display URL.
But you should also be aware that the time period is also a variable. By split testing ad D with A, the comparison would be incorrect. You need to reset the ads, by starting them all over again.
I know you can overcome the time period variable by filtering the results on Google AdWords by the respective date range. But I just find my way a lot cleaner.
Here is something that I do that you may want to adopt. You can delete ads A and B once you know for sure that ads C and D are running fine. But I just keep them paused. I do this for 2 reasons:
- To keep a history of my ads online
- To keep the ads visible on the offline AdWords Editor. When I edit ads I like to see a history of previous ads. If I delete the ads, they will not show up on AdWords Editor. Pausing is just a quick workaround for me.
Getting Started With AdWords
When I got started with Internet Marketing, I think I tried everything else but AdWords. Mainly because of the fact that it was a traffic generating tool that involved paying someone (Google in this case). I had also heard of lots of people just bombing out and loosing money.
Of course being new, that was something I really wanted to avoid. So I stayed clear of AdWords completely and opted for other means of traffic generation like blogging and article marketing.
Then of course I got into Andrew & Daryl Grant’s course which uses AdWords extensively in their business. I then decided that I better get into it and learn up.
They had recommended an e-book, Perry Marshall’s “Definitive Guide To AdWords”. Perry is widely regarded as the premier AdWords “Guru”. I immediately bought his e-book and poured through it. What I discovered after I implemented his lessons, really made me wish I had started sooner.
One of the first things that Perry teaches, is that there is a wrong way and a right way to set up an AdWords campaign. The wrong way is to just write and ad and put every keyword for your market to trigger that ad…WRONG.
The right way is to put your keywords into very tight groups. Where each group represents a unique mindset or topic within your market. That way you can right an ad that is highly related to the keywords in that group; increasing the probability of it being clicked by your target customer.
By just implementing this strategy alone, I believe is the main reason, I have continually managed to get average CTRs of 2% to 3% within the first week of launching campaigns (CTR is a Google metric of ad relevance).
There is of course so much more that he shares. That is why I really recommend his e-book if you want to get started with AdWords. But if you want to just get an idea of the value he can deliver, then click here to sign up for Perry’s free 5 day AdWords course.