Split Testing Ads - The How, The Why, and The When!

Welcome to Split Testing Ads 101. In this article I hope to explain to you exactly why you need to be split testing your ads, when is the best time to start split testing ads, and also exactly HOW TO split test ads.

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.

Popularity: 34% [?]