Split testing your PPC ads may look complicated, but the potential payoff for your time and effort is enormous. Since most PPC ads are on-going investments, every small improvement can […]
You’ve written what you perceive to be a good ad (or let’s hope you wouldn’t have written it). But, what you perceive doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter to the search […]
Chad Summerhill wrote a nice post recently about something you should be doing if you manage your own PPC account and something you should be showing your clients if you manage accounts for others – visual statistically significant ad test results by time period. Check out the “how-to” in that post.
There’s a lot more leverage in writing and testing great ads than a lot of the activities that PPC managers can spend their time on. For those using AdWords, testing is the answer to almost everything. But, testing works better if you’re able to test things that matter. People get caught testing things like switching lines around or replacing colons with semicolons and they end up creating basically similar ads.
In this episode of PPC Rockstars, David and Howie explained the coined “Checkmate Method” to their listeners that focuses in on a more intense way to write and test your ads against your competition. Here are some of the highlights…
If you take your PPC campaigns seriously (why wouldn’t you?), you’re always testing. Always. It’s the only way to accomplish long-term growth and gain insights that will translate into all of your other marketing channels. One problem that has been inherent since the beginning of PPC is the inability to do true A/B split-testing with variables like keywords, bids, ad text, ad groups, match types, dynamic keyword insertion, etc.
OK, so you get this previous post about ad testing and you set up some tests… now what? How do you measure the results? One of the cool features of AdWords is the ability to make a report to observe almost anything about your account. In the case of measuring ad performance, you can create an (that’s right, you guessed it) Ad Performance Report.
Once a PPC account is set up and running, a good account manager is always looking for ways to improve results to better reach the account’s marketing goals. One such way is to test different types of ad messages to gain insights into what attracts your industry’s customers to your products/services so that you can better understand and communicate with them.
One of the most important things you can do to get all that you can out of your PPC campaigns is to practice granular ad group organization. This does not mean you leave out 1-2 word phrases because we know they carry a lot of needed volume and conversions. So, what do we do with them? Put them in their own campaigns where you can better control them. Then, pull 3-word phrases that perform well enough to have their own ad groups and create them as you optimize your account.
If you are spending your whole PPC budget on what works, you are falling behind. Almost every author or speaker on the subject will tell you that as soon as they are ready to publish their book or deliver their presentation, the information has changed. This industry, like most of the world, is moving fast.