If you’ve ever spoken to me via social media sites or via Instant Messaging for any length of time, you’ll know that I’m not the type of person to say one method is better than the other.  Unfortunately in this business, certain methods work for some people, while completely different methods work for others.  There is no clear cut solution or any clear cut path to follow in order to succeed in affiliate marketing.

However, I received an email about two weeks ago with a very specific question about split testing.  I responded to the person with the same advice I’m about to talk about in this blog post.  The email asked…

I know split testing is important, in fact, from what I understand it may be the single most important aspect I can do in affiliate marketing to influence the scaling process of my campaigns.  However, I’ve seen several methods for split testing and I was wondering which method worked best.  Some sites I’ve read say that you should split test two versions of whatever your testing at the same time, while others suggest split testing one type one day and then another the next day.  Which method do you feel would have the greatest impact on my split testing efforts?

Now, when I started split testing, I always used the A/B method of split testing which means that you split test two variations at the exact same time giving both equal exposure.  In fact, it’s not something I have even really thought about thus my reason for never writing a blog post about it before now.  However, after thinking about it, I felt that it was worthy of a blog post because I do believe there is a very clear cut way of doing it that will yield the best results!

The other, most common, method you see affiliates use is the AB split testing method.  The only difference between the two is that with the A/B method you are split testing both things at the same exact time giving them both equal exposure.  With the AB method you are split testing them at different times, or days.  For example, you may split test a landing page on Monday, document the results, and then put up a new landing page on Tuesday, compare the results and pick the best one.

The downside with the AB split testing model is that unfortunately data can be very different on different days and even on the same day but morning vs. evening.  Some campaigns do really well during the evenings, but horrible during the mornings, if you are running one page in the morning and one in the evening, your better landing page may actually be the one that you are running in the mornings but because conversions suck for your niche in the mornings, it looks like your landing page doesn’t do well at all.

However, if you are using the A/B method you know that both items you are split testing are getting the same exact data.  They are sharing visitors equally and both are being displayed both in the morning, afternoon, and evening.  This insures that you aren’t receiving data that is skewed because of changes in the visitors you receive throughout the day.

Now, as I said in the opening paragraphs of this blog post, not every method works best for everyone.  There is one other method that I’ve found works decent and that is the ABAB method.

This works just like the AB method, but there is one major difference.  You split test landing page one on Monday, then landing page two on Tuesday, however, you then continue on giving each one more time.  So you’d split test landing page one on Wednesday for the second time, and then split test landing page two on Thursday for a second time.

Personally I still don’t believe this is the best method and when compared with the A/B split testing method, I’m not sure why you’d choose it, however, there are some that believe that the ABAB method is the best choice.  In fact, it is a common way of split testing in other fields like Pyschology.  These fields use the ABAB method for most experiments.

Ultimately the choice is yours, however, I’d highly recommend going with the A/B method or at the very least the ABAB method.  Using the AB method is in my opinion simply being lazy and it will impact your business in a very negative way!

First let me start off with the biggest pitfall that most affiliates fall prey to when it comes to offers that affiliates are promoting…  They quit testing new offers!

Affiliates find an offer that’s working, working well in fact, and they immediately stop testing new offers within their niche.  The reason for this is actually quite simple, they are afraid that they’ll find an offer that converts worse than the one they are using… and a worse converting offer means they lose money!!!

First, let me explain why it’s worth losing a little bit of money now or taking a chunk of your traffic and split testing an offer that may actually convert worse, sometimes…. a lot worse!

The bottom line is that things in this industry change, and they change fast!  Offers come and go and great converting offers sometimes become horrible converting offers.  This can be caused by several different factors, including but not limited to, too many affiliates pushing the offer (as an offer converts really well, more and more affiliates find out about that offer!), the advertiser changes their landing page too drastically, or other advertisers start promoting something better than what offer you’re running is!

So what do you do?  How can you test other offers without losing too much money?  I have to be honest, the main way is going to sound soo simple, in fact, many of you may simply be like “Duh!”, why didn’t I think of that, but seriously it’s not your fault!

Don’t split test 50/50 on your offers!  I know this is something that is drilled into affiliates heads from just about every blogger out there including myself, as it works for most stuff, however, there really isn’t much of a need to split test your traffic 50/50 to test out a new offer.  Instead, maybe try an 80/20 split, sending 80 percent of your traffic to the offer that you know converts well while only sending 20 percent to the new offer.

Secondly, don’t split test more than two offers at a time!  The more offers you’re trying to test at a time, the more you’ll have to split up your traffic in order to get a good read on each offer!

Thirdly, keep a close eye on the new offers, as soon as you feel you have enough data (clicks/leads) that have come in to get a good reading at how the offer converts, then move on!

Lastly, Talk to your affiliate managers!  Most networks have the average conversion rate of what an offer gets across the entire network, while this will change person to person, it can at least give you a starting point as to what offers to split test first!

I know these sound like some easy tips, and for my more advance readers, sorry, but I get tons of emails a day asking me how to properly split test offers, so I thought I should write up a little article on how!

At first when I started mentoring and consulting individuals, I thought to myself, well maybe they just don’t realize how important split testing is, but than I realized that just about every single affiliate blog out there talks about split testing ALL THE TIME!  In fact, I’ve talked about it in depth several times on this blog and touching on each aspect of split testing, whether it’s split testing landing pages, or split testing ads, split testing offers and networks, or whatever!

I’ve explained in these posts, why you need to do it, how extremely important it is, and what types of benefits it will have on your campaigns, in fact so have a ton of other bloggers like Chad from CDF Networks in which he wrote a post entitled Split Test Everything!  Jonathan Volk wrote a post on Increasing Landing Page Conversions where he talks about split testing and it’s benefits and why you need to be doing it!

I could go on and on with posts all over the internet that talk about split testing, yet there isn’t a need for me to, simply  go to any affiliate blog and type in split testing, you’ll see that it’s a subject that is talked about all the time, yet very few affiliates seem to be doing it!

Instead, they launch a campaign in a niche like payday loans, it isn’t profitable and they move on to another niche and so forth over and over wondering why they aren’t making money!  Instead, find out why you campaign is failing, whether it’s your ads, landing page, keywords, etc and split test them!  What???  You aren’t tracking each of those things to find out where your problems are?  Then you’re an even bigger idiot!!!

Quit being lazy, quit making excuses and start split testing…  I promise you if you do, you’ll drastically see increases in your profits as an affiliate marketer!

Sorry guys, I love you all, but really felt like I needed to be blunt with this one!  Hugs and Kisses!

However, there are only so many big things we can change.  When it comes to small things though, we have tons of little settings we can fool around with like colors we can change, or certain words we bold, italicize, or highlight, etc.  Each of these small things may only raise our conversion rate or CTR by 1% or even .5%, but if we do 30 of these small things we could raise our CTR or conversion rate by 30%!!!

So what exactly are some of the small things that we can test?  Did you know that certain fonts convert better than other fonts?  Did you know that certain background colors convert better?  How about the fact that by bolding or italicizing a couple words throughout your landing page could increase conversions?

Have I sparked your curiosity yet?  If so, then hopefully the list below can kinda be a checklist for you to help you remember to check the little things when you are split testing your landing pages…

Things to Split Test on your Landing Page:

• Split test what font you’re using!
• Have you split tested your background color?
• Have you tried to bold or italicize certain words or phrases that could help sell users?
• What about underlining certain things?
• Are you linking to the offer page throughout your article?
• Are you including a Go Back To Top Link at the bottom of your landing page or another Button or Link at the bottom to take your user to the offer page?
• Don’t forget to add testimonials to help build trust with your visitors if your niche allows for them.
• Can you include any endorsed by, affiliated with, or as seen (in, on, at) buttons?  For example, As seen on Oprah or Endorsed with the Good Housekeeping Seal!

The list above is just a couple of the “small things” you could be doing and adding to your landing pages in order to increase conversions and CTR’s.  If you aren’t doing them, you need to start!  If you are using them then good for you!

If you have any other “small things” that you know of that work well in increasing CTR’s and Conversions I’d love for you to share them with me in the comments below.  It’s the smalls things that sometimes make huge differences!

I’ve decided to write a couple more posts on split testing.  I’ve currently written one for both split testing ads and split testing landing pages.  In this post, I’m going to be talking about split testing offers and using different networks to do this.  In future posts, I’ll be talking about other things you need to be split testing.

Most blogs you read talk about split testing ads and then they leave it at that, however, as you’ll see from this blog there are many more things to split test!  I wasn’t going to do anymore articles on split testing because I wasn’t sure if it was necessary to touch on each one, however, after reading a post by Chad from CDFnetworks entitled Split Test Everything, I decided to go ahead and continue doing articles on split testing.

Split Testing Offers

Most affiliates leave this step out and in my opinion it’s a very important step.  In fact, some do start split testing their offers, however, after they find a decent one they all of a sudden stop!  Instead of pushing forward to try and find an even better converting offer, they become complacent.  So what exactly do I mean when I say split test different offers?

Split testing your offers is the same process as split testing your ads or landing pages.  In essence you are simply swapping out your affiliate link from one offer or network and replacing it with a different offer or network to see if that other offer is able to give you a higher ecpc.

So I simply try to find an offer with a higher conversion rate?

No, most affiliates fall into this pattern of looking at the conversion rates of offers!  So before I continue talking about how to split test offers and common practices, I want to clear this up!  You are looking for an offer that has a higher ecpc (estimated cost per click).  Let me explain why real quick…

If you have an offer that pays out one dollar for every lead and it converts at 25% that means for every 4 people you send you’ll earn .25 cents.  .25 cents is your ecpc.   That means that the highest amount you could bid in order to break even.

Now let’s say you have an offer that pays out ten dollars for every lead and it converts at 20% that means for every 5 people you send you’ll earn 2.00 dollars.  2.00 dollars is your ecpc.  That means you could bid up to 2.00 dollars on your keywords and still break even.

Of course that isn’t always true, sometimes you have an ecpc of .50 cents but if you raise your bids to .50 cents you’d start to lose money, however it gives you a general idea on what you could spend up to.  That’s why it’s important to ask for the ecpc for a particular offer when looking.  Simply ask your affiliate manager and they should be able to supply this information to you immediately.

Moving On

So, you’re not looking at the conversion rates, but the ecpc.  So after you have selected your first offer to run, you will want to allow time for data to come in.  Normally a week is about what I like to give each offer personally.  This allows me to make sure it’s as accurate as possible since some days perform better than other days during the week depending on the offer.

After you have run your offer, you simply replace it with another offer to see if it will perform better or not.  Okay, I know your next question…  How do I know which offers to try and which ones to stay clear of?  Well, unfortunately there isn’t any surefire way to tell if an offer sucks or not without testing it yourself in my opinion, however, there is a good way to get a starting list.

Simply email your affiliate manager and ask them if they could send you a list of all the offers they have for the niche you’re working in and ask them to include the ecpc for each offer.

NOTE: Make sure if you’re only running PPC traffic to it, that you tell them to give you the ecpc for search traffic only.  This also goes for organic traffic or email traffic.  That way you ensure that you’re receiving the most accurate data you can.

After you receive this list, you should have an order in which to test the offers out.  Starting with the offer that has the highest ecpc and moving down.  Easy enough right?

Testing the Same Offer on Multiple Networks

Did you know that multiple networks normally have the same exact offers?  Did you know that most even have the same exact landing page?  Okay smarty pants…Did you know that the same exact offer with the same exact landing page can possibly convert better and have a higher ecpc on a different network?

That’s right, your ecpc can vary depending on the network you’re using!

Not only do you need to test different offers, but you also need to test different networks.  That makes it a little more difficult, well not really difficult, just more time consuming!  I won’t beat around the bush, some networks scrape leads, although sometimes it’s not really the networks but the software they use…*cough* Direct Track *cough*

So the bottom line is you need to track both different offers and the same offer on different networks!

Finding a Great Offer with a Great ecpc

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, I see affiliates all of a sudden stop split testing offers.  Why?  Well, my guess is because they find an offer that does really well and have a great ecpc so they don’t want to keep testing and drop to an offer that does worse, however, you must also remember that you could again find one that does even better!

What I Recommend

If you find an offer that is doing exceptionally well, instead of split testing new offers across your entire campaign, only send maybe 10% of your traffic to a new offer in order to keep testing!  This will still give you an idea on offers and if you find one that is doing better in that 10% then try it across the whole board!

Question

Do you currently split test your offers?  Do you split test the same offer among different networks?  Do you feel that all affiliates should be doing this simple step?  If you could say one thing that could encourage some affiliates to start split testing their offers if their not currently doing so, what would you say?

Below you’ll find 5 different things that you should be testing when you start to split test your ads!

• Capitalization – What is the best way to capitalize your words in your ads?  Should You Capitalize The First Letter of Each Word?  Should you only capitalize the first word of each sentance?  The first letter of Important Words?  How about your display URL?  Should any part of that be capitalized?  This is something that is very important and by simply capitalizing your words a certain way could change your CTR% by crazy amounts!  Unfourtenly, you must test each of these things as it changes depending on the niche!

• Use of Numbers – Should you use an average number when you’re mention numbers or statistics?  For example if the cost is $49.99 for your service or product should you put $50 instead?  Studies have shown that using exact numbers is typically the best approach as it helps to make your ad stand out from all the other competition thats out there!  However, again this isn’t alwasy the case!  You’ll need to test this yourself for each niche you enter!

• Display URLS – Display URLS can be very important and are often ignored as part of your ad writing process!  Most affiliates feel they have 3 lines to work with when it comes to creating ads, however, if you count your display URL, you actually have 4 lines!  Should you capitalize certain letters?  Should you only use the base URL or add a /keyword to it? Should you include the “www” or not?  Again, the key to figuring this out is to test each way until you find the display URL that gives you the greatest conversions and CTR%.

• Ask a Question – A simple way to increase your CTR% normally is to simply ask an inticing question in your ad.  This will cause searchers to think and if they feel their answer will be met on your site, they’ll typically click through.  So make sure you test several different types of questions and also try not having a question.  You’ll never know which way will work best for any given niche unless you test it!

• Write Specific Ads for Each Keyword Group – As most of you have probably heard your adgroups should be tightly grouped by using base keywords.  Naturally and Simple Enough, your ads should be different for each of these adgroups and include teh keywords for each adgroup in the ad!  You should never ever write generic ads and just throw the same ads into each adgroup and expect the results to be good.

There you have it!  5 things to test when you’re split testing your ads.  By testing these 5 different things you can easily take an ad that is getting a CTR% of 2% and increase it to 8%, 12%, or even 20% depending on the niche and amount of competition you have!

So quit your crying and get to work before I pass you up in the niche you’re working on!

This topic will explain some common mistakes that people make when creating landing pages. Hopefully after reading this post you’ll be able to clearly understand the problems your landing page may be causing!

1. Your Call to Action is below the Fold - Your call to action is what causes your visitors to go from your landing page to the offer or service your promoting thus the reason it’s called a call to action. This could be a big red button that says sign up for free, or a list of features with a sign up now button, etc. So, why would you want your call to action below the fold when you automatically lose ~30% of your visitors if they have to scroll down?
2. Trying to Collect too Much Data – Trying to get a visitor to sign up for a newsletter is fine for future sales to an email list you put together, however, you may be hurting your conversions! The more information that you try to collect from your visitors the more likely they won’t end up completing the offer. Try to keep your data collecting to a minimum and only collect information that you truly need!
3. Missing Testimonials - Testimonials can greatly increase conversion rates and instill trust in your visitors eyes. They tend to help the visitor realize that the product/service your offering is worth their time in filling out any necessary information or even whipping out their credit card. If you can use testimonials in your niche, your only hurting yourself by not at least trying them out on your landing page!
4. Too Many Call to Actions – As said above you need to have a clear call to action above the fold. You shouldn’t ever have more than 2 call to actions on a landing page. Asking a user to sign up for an offer or service your offering would be one call to action, asking them to sign up for a newsletter would be another call to action. Asking users to subscribe to newsletters, subscribe to your RSS feed, give you a call, etc may sound like a great idea to get return customers and build up a great list, having too many can cause confusion and also end up making the visitor forget why they even came to your site, thus, you lose out on a commission!
5. Not Split Testing Landing Pages – Another mistake I see people commonly make is to not split test their landing pages. I recently wrote an article about split testing landing pages, how to do it, what parts of your landing page to split test, etc. If you haven’t check it out already, you need to as split testing can greatly increase your profits and allow you to find out which landing page(s) work best!

So there you have it, five reasons your landing page may suck! Get to work and correct the problems on your landing pages and immediately see the results. You’ll be amazed at what a few simple things can do to your conversions!

Split Testing is basically the process of testing different variations of Ad Copy (Ads), Landing Pages, Your Price, etc. The reason that we split test and especially in affiliate marketing is so that we can increase our conversion ratio or ROI (return over investment). Basically what that means is this…

Let’s say you start a campaign for dating. Let’s also assume that for every one dollar you spend on advertising via PPC you make two dollars. Now by split testing you can increase how many people that come to your landing page convert. By doing so, now when you spend one dollar on advertising via PPC, you make 3 dollars!

Split Testing allows you to make more without spending more!

Now, I’ve already wrote an article on Split Testing Ads which you may also wish to check out if your completely new to the idea of split testing or just want a refresher course.

Okay, now that I’ve explained what split testing is, let’s dive into why you should split test your landing page, the benefits of split testing your landing page, and how to split test landing pages.

Benefits of Split Testing Your Landing Page:

The benefits of split testing are numerous but I just want to touch on the most important in this article. So without further adieu…

Increased Conversion Rate – The single most important reason for split testing your landing page is to increase conversions. Increasing conversions allows you to spend the same amount of money, yet increase your revenue while paying the same amount for advertising if your using PPC (pay per click).

Quality Score – Another benefit although not always as easy to test, is the ability to increase your quality score that you receive from Google Adwords. Again this is hard to test as the quality score can take a couple days or even weeks to recalculate each time.

Again, there are several other factors that split testing can accomplish, however, in order to keep this article short and to the point I’ve decided to only list the top reasons in my opinion.

What should I split test?

Okay, so you now realize the benefits to split testing landing pages, but how do you do it? Which parts of your landing page do you change? Do you have two completely different landing pages or two similar ones with only certain parts changed?

The answer to this question is that there really isn’t a right or wrong way, although if you do use two completely different landing pages for your testing, once you find one that works well, I would recommend moving on to the latter.

So, in reference to that, below is a list of things you may want to consider changing to increase landing page conversions.

1. Split Test your Heading! Your heading is the first thing that people notice when they come to your site. Thus, people could stay or leave your site based just on that one main headline! In fact, people will leave or stay based on your headline. I’ve seen a headline instantly increase conversions by three hundred percent to five hundred percent!
2. Split Test your Sub-Headline! Your sub-headline is probably the second most important thing you should split test following right after your headline. Again, by creating another landing page with just simply your sub-headline changed you could increase your conversion rate by one hundred and fifty percent to two hundred percent!
3. Split Test each Paragraph! Split testing your paragraphs can take a lot of work, and most of the time you really only need to focus on split testing your first paragraph. Personally I only worry about the first paragraph when I’m split testing and very seldom split test my others. I will however rewrite the rest of my paragraphs once I have split tested my first paragraph and know what works for the niche I’m currently working on!
   TIP: Using 3-5 bullets stating the main points of the offer/service you are promoting generally works extremely well for your first paragraph! This is probably because most internet users will skim pages instead of taking the time to fully read each paragraph.
4. Split Test your Call to Action Line/Button! Does a green button work better than a blue button? How about a red color one? Does Order Now or Order Today work better? Can you use the word free? Your call to action button can make a customer leave your site even if they’ve read and looked over everything else. Your heading, sub-heading, and article/description could be perfect! Yet, you’ll still lose visitors if your call to action doesn’t well….call the user to perform an action!

As you can see, there are several factors to test when your split testing your landing pages, and hopefully the above steps will help you get started!

Okay, so now your wanting the code in order to do this easily correct? Well the code below allows you to test two different landing pages and each time a visitor comes to your site it will randomly send them to one or the other. Then you simply switch out the worse performing landing page with a new one every couple of days.

PHP Code for Split Testing Landing Pages


<?php
if(rand(0,1) == 0) {
header("Location: http://www.example.com/split1");
} else {
header("Location: http://www.example.com/split2");
}
?>

In the code where it says split1 and split2, you would replace that with whatever you call your two filenames.  Make sure you also put .html or .php after the filename depending on which extension your using.  Also, don’t forget to change www.example.com to your sites URL!

So, there you have it!  Now get out there and start increasing your ROI by split testing your landing pages!

This post will hopefully provide him as well as all my readers some tips on growing your affiliate marketing business with ease and simplicity.

Offers Come and Go!

One of the first mistakes I saw him making was focusing on niches that come and go. He was doing a lot of seasonal offers like taxes for example. Now, these are really great niches to get into and seasonal niches can really bring in a big buck in a short period of time, because a lot of people don’t worry about seasonal offers at all, including myself! ::embarrassed::

However, he was mostly only focusing on these seasonal niches, so he would get a campaign doing well, and then it would fade in a month and he would have to basically start from scratch.

Also, even regular campaigns you setup, you need to realize that any day the network could pull the offer that your running, or the company could end the affiliate program. So you should always be prepared. I’m a very big believer in scaling a campaign as much as you can, but I’m also experienced enough to know that you shouldn’t only be concentrating on one or two niches!

So my advice to you if your in this category is to work on setting up some other niches, some niches that are pretty safe in terms of they’ll be here for a while. Just some examples, ringtones, dating, insurance, etc. Continue to do your seasonal offers as they are a great way to make a good income, but don’t rely totally on those niches.

Don’t Spread Yourself Too Thin!

Another problem I see a lot of young affiliates do is spread themselves too thin.  They start making money and instead of focusing on scaling their campaigns or starting new campaigns, they instead decide to start a blog on affiliate marketing, etc.

Now, I have no problem with an affiliate starting a blog about affiliate marketing, in fact, I encourage it eventually because it’s great for several reasons which I’ll talk about at a later time.  The thing you need to remember is in the beginning your working on growing your affiliate business.  Blogs and other side projects take a lot of time, and they don’t normally supply the money like your current affiliate marketing business would if you scaled it some more.

Another point of affiliate marketing is too not try to start up too many offers at the same time, or have too many campaigns that require your daily attention running at the same time, etc.  If you start campaign after campaign without actually finishing and scaling a previous campaign your going to neglect campaigns you’ve already done and before you realize it they are going to start losing money as others compete against you in your niche and win!

Become Friends With Your Affiliate Managers

One of the quickest and most effective ways to make more in any given niche is to get a higher payout on an offer that your running.  The best way to do this isn’t bringing in tons of volume, okay maybe it is for a really big payout, it’s simply becoming friends with your affiliate managers.  Talk to them, chat them up a bit.  That doesn’t mean IM them and ask them a ton of questions, they get enough of those everyday, instead maybe ask them if there are any offers you should be running and then strike up some small talk.  It works wonders!

Make Sure Your Tracking at The Keyword Level!

I get the question of how do I scale/grow my affiliate business all the time, yet when I ask them which keywords are converting for them currently, they can’t tell me!   They aren’t tracking at the keyword level.  Yeah you can make money in this crazy game we call affiliate marketing, but if your not tracking your keywords its near impossible to scale without just throwing in a bunch more keywords and hoping for the best.  Tracking is key in this business!!!

I wrote a post about Keyword Tracking via Google’s Adwords Pixel, and I’m soon going to write one about using Yahoo’s Pixel to track keywords.  If your not sure how to track keywords at the keyword level you may want to check the post out as it gives you one good option.  There are several ways to do it.

Make Sure Your Split Testing Everything!

Another quick and easy way to increase your income is by split testing.  You should be split testing your Ads, Your Landing Pages, whether broad, phrase, or exact match works best, etc.  SPLIT TEST EVERYTHING!!!

Split testing allows you spend less yet make the same amount of money by increasing conversions, increasing your quality score which allows you to bid less for the same position, etc.  Make sure you doing this!

I wrote an article recently about split testing ads and how to do it!  You may want to check it out if your not sure how it works.

Conclusion:

I hope these tips well help you grow your affiliate business and give you a starting point when your not sure what to do.

If anyone has any other suggestions for affiliate marketers who are already making a little each month from affiliate marketing but want to grow their business please let us know in the comments.  I would love to hear your suggestions.

What is Split Ad Testing?

To put it very simply split ad testing is where you have two ads per adgroup in which basically the ads are competing against each other to see which ad can receive the highest CTR (Click Through Rate).

Why Do I Need To Split Test My Ads?

Split testing your ads allows you to constantly work on improving your CTR. By increasing your CTR you can raise the position of which your ad is show on a search engine and pay less for that spot. Each search engine page typically shows ten ads per page going down the right side of the organic results. In order to get in the top spots you either need to increase your bids to bid your way to the top or you need to raise your quality score.

One of the most effective ways of raising your quality score is by having a high CTR percentage. This is especially true with Yahoo Search Marketing and also with Microsoft Adcenter. Google Adwords has alot more involved in their quality score algorithm, however, CTR is still very important in Google Adwords and in terms of your adgroups overall quality score.

When Should I Start Split Testing My Ads?

The answer to this question is immediately! Most people think they need to have a ton of data first before they start doing any split testing whatsoever, however, even if your only receiving a couple hundred impressions a day thats more than enough to do split testing with your ads.

Normally, the way I do it is to give a new campaign a day or two to run depending on how many impressions you are receiving. But within two days you should be looking at your current ads and replacing the ad with the lowest CTR with a new ad. Then you should continue to do this every couple of days. If your receiving enough data to do it every day you should be doing that.

Alright, I Get It! So How Do I Split Test My Ads?

Split Testing your Ads really isn’t that difficult and you really only need to remember one thing! Small Changes can Yield Huge Results!

Before I go more into that let’s explain one more time exactly what your doing. When you create a new campaign you have several adgroups in that campaign. In each adgroup you should have two ads. These two ads as I said before are basically competing against each other to see which one can get the highest CTR.

When I first create two ads for my adgroup, I create two ads that are relevant to my group of keywords in that adgroup. I don’t make them similar to each other, in fact, I typically try to create two different styles of ads.

Once you have your first two ads and you’ve gotten enough data to see which ad has the highest CTR its time to move onto the next step. Also, keep in mind that whenever you are split testing ads you want to make sure that the ads are being shown equally and that you don’t have optimize ads turned on. You want both ads to receive an equal amount of impressions to make sure the data is as accurate as possible.

Next, you open up your adgroup and lets say you see something like this…

As you can see the ad with the title Free Auto Insurance Quote has the highest CTR currently at .12% whereas the ad with the title Save Big on Insurance only has a CTR of .05%. So since we know which Ad has the highest CTR we simply delete the ad with the lowest CTR.

We are then just left with this Ad…

Free Auto Insurance Quote
Save Money Today When You Switch.
Compare Quotes to Save Big!
GetInsuranceQuotesNow.info

Do you remember what I said was the most important thing at the beginning of this section on how to split test ads? I said Small Changes Can Yield Huge Results. Most people when they create their new ad in this part just make up another ad, however, the best way I’ve found to do this is to take the ad you already have and rewrite it with just a small change or two. So our new ad would look something like this with the changes in bold so you can see what I changed.

Free Auto Insurance Quotes
Save Money Today When You Switch!
Compare Quotes to Save Now!
GetInsuranceQuotesNow.info

Now by making the above changes I increased the CTR on that ad from .12% to .96%. So as you can see by taking my current ad with the highest CTR and just changing a few small things I raised my CTR quite significantly.

So there you have it! The How, The Why, and The When to Split Testing Ads.