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.
It shows each ad you’ve created and any metric that you desire to analyze. You can export this data into an Excel spreadsheet for analysis as well, to make it a bit easier to sort the data and look at specific metrics for specific insights.
Once you are looking at the results of your ad copy test, you want to decide what is working best for your account. And the ad that is working best for your account is the one that is achieving your specific marketing goals the best. So, first ask yourself, what is the one thing that I want my ad to do that is most important to my account performance right now? It may be to get the most customers possible, to lower cost per customer, or to get as many visitors to your site as possible. Of course, all of these would be great, but the winner of your ad test should be the ad that performs best for your main marketing goal.
So, you save that ad. But, you’re not done with the others. See what you can glean from them to create new ads to challenge your winner. Yeah, ad #2 may have been your winner because you are looking for the lowest cost per customer, but why did ad #4 perform over twice as good for CTR?
If you can figure that out and raise your CTR while keeping the cost per conversion low, you’ll improve performance even more. Decide what worked and mix and match those elements in an effort to outperform the winner in the next test period.
So, you could take each of the specific elements of ad copy #2 and #4 and stick them into new ads to gain insight into the elements that work with your audience for different metrics. Your 2nd test may look something like this:
New Ad #1 = Ad #2 headline, ad #4 description line 1, ad #2 description line 2, ad #4 display URL
New Ad #2 = Ad #4 headline, ad #2 description line 1, ad #4 description line 2, ad #2 display URL
and so on….
Then, when you do further analysis, you can filter the individual elements of your original ads to see which ones performed the best for each metric in all of the new ads as a whole. This will help you to know what elements are important to keep and which ones can be done away with.
In my next post, we’ll take a look at when the right times may be to analyze your ad performance results….