Split Testing Your Campaigns

When creating your ads you will want to split test campaigns against one another, so you can determine which are performing better while tweaking and improving your overall results.

When split testing, you simply create two identical ad groups with only one distinct difference between them.

For example, begin by creating two identical advertisements with the only difference being the headline.  Then, allow your advertisements to run simultaneously and once they have received an adequate amount of exposure, you simply choose the winning headline and eliminate the ‘dud’.

Note; It’s important to only have one difference between two ads so that you can clearly determine what modification or tweak was responsible for the improved performance. Otherwise, it will be difficult to determine the better performing advertisement.

You should also give your ads enough time to run, gaining equal amounts of exposure prior to selecting a ‘winning ad’.  I personally both ads to run until they have both received at least 50 impressions (views), prior to changing or removing an advertisement.

When you split test your advertisements, you should focus on split testing every single aspect of your ad, from the advertisement’s title, body text, display URL and even destination URL. 

In order to set up your Split Testing Campaign within your Google Adwords account, log in and click on the campaign that you wish to test.

From there, click on “Edit Campaign Settings”

Within that table, you will see the option to “Rotate: Show Ads More Evenly”.

Save your changes and begin split testing your ad campaigns!

Note:  Keep a close eye on the performance of your advertisements. When it comes to split testing you never want to leave your ads running for very long before evaluating which one is converting better.  Since you are paying for every click received, you want to be careful to monitor whether an advertisement is generating a high number of click through’s without resulting in a lead or sale.

CTR Explained

The main aim of PPC is to maximize the impressions/exposure of your ads by focusing on highly targeted traffic in order to generate a solid click-through rate. Ad impressions refers to the number of times, or frequency in which your ads appear within the Google search results, whenever  your target audience search for your keywords.

The proportion or ratio in which ad impressions successfully generate clicks is referred to as Click Through Ratio or CTR.

A Click Through Rate (CTR) is a simple method of measuring the overall success of your campaigns, based on the number of times your advertisement appeared and the overall number of times a visitor clicked on your link and visited your website.

For example, if your PPC advertisement appeared 100 times and only a single person clicked on your advertisement, your overall CTR would be estimated at 1%.

CTR is defined by the number of clicks received divided by the number of impressions (views), rather than simply by the number of clicks itself.  

Your CTR is an integral part of your PPC marketing campaigns because it will be the ultimate determining factor as to how much you end up paying for every click to your ad.  Google Adwords takes your CTR into careful consideration when setting your quality score, a rating system that dictates what each advertiser will pay for every click-through to your ads.

The higher your quality score is, the less you pay per click.  Better yet, if you are able to maximize your quality score, you can end up paying less for the exact same spot as someone else who is paying more per click for exposure.

(Example: If your quality score is 7 and someone else’s is 5, you would actually rank higher within the search engine results while paying less per click).