To use Google AdWords to best advantage, you should always have at least two Ad Variations running in any Ad Group. By doing so, you're always optimizing - trying to 'beat' your current best-performing ad version. And eventually, you'll find new text, or a revised format that works better.
This is a proven, winning strategy in all direct-marketing.But there's a problem in the way Google addresses this strategy. By default, their Campaign Management panel is set-up so that Google chooses your better performing ad for you. Then Google displays it more often.
Sounds good. But there’s a little problem; the Google automatic system typically chooses your 'best' ad far too soon.You need to allow time for each ad to accumulate around 30 clicks (for example, “ad A” has 40 clicks and “ad B” has 30 clicks), before you can be sure a clear and reliable winner has emerged.
You should always monitor ad performance yourself and choose your own best ad, rather than have Google do this for you.
Make sure it’s youwho’s deciding which ad is better… and not Google
Go to; Campaign Summary >[name of your campaign] > Edit Campaign Settings. In the Advanced Options section of the screen, under, 'Ad serving,' de-select, 'Optimize: Show better-performing ads more often,' and instead select, 'Rotate: Show ads more evenly'.
Once the recommended number of clicks has registered, you can see which ad is the better performer. Amend the loser with a slight change, and start the process again. Your aim; continuous improvement.
The Ad Variations tab is where you perform your split-testing in Google Adwords The Ad Variations tab is where you need to look, to decide which ad is performing better, rather than letting Google decide for you.
I recommend you allow a total of 30-40 clicks (in other words, make sure if you add up the total number of clicks on the two ads, they each total at least 30-40) before you determine the winner.
Then, once you have a winning ad, make a minor change to your losing add (perhaps create a new, slightly different headline. Or perhaps a word in the ad text, or even just a punctuation change) and try to beat your winning ad again.
Only change one thing at a time, and see how it goes – otherwise, you won’t know which element of your ad that you changed actually made the difference!
What You Need to UNDERSTAND: Google chooses what they think is your best-performing ad. But their system chooses the ‘winner’ too darn early. Resulting in inefficiencies in your campaign. So make sure you monitor and determine your own
winner, with more statistically significant data.
Split testing is an extremely powerful online marketing method that allows you to test two versions of a web page at the same time. This is why it is also frequently called ‘A/B testing.’ Whenever you are split testing a page, you have two versions:
Version A: is the control group. This is your existing web page
Your goal in split testing is to always try to come up with a new test to beat your control group. As soon as you have created a new version to test, Google will start to serve the two versions of your page in real-time and show you which ad is performing better.
The art of split testingTo dramatically boost the performance of your PPC ads with split testing, just keep two principles in mind.
1) Test everything