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.