How To Conduct Ad Tests In Enhanced Campaigns. Eliminating Ambiguity in PPC - Beyond the Paid. Time for a pop quiz!
What do the following have in common? You have 30 seconds to give your answer. Ready? Go! • Tesla • Madonna • Prince • Washington • Sam Adams • Chojuro Did you figure it out? All the names above are ambiguous. When you say Tesla, do you mean the man, the band, or the coil? Prince and Washington have probably 100 meanings between the two of them. In normal conversation, ambiguity is often eliminated by the context. In PPC, though, the context is in the mind of the searcher. Celebrity names aren’t the only ambiguous search terms out there. . • Comfort Inn • Comfort Suites • Quality Inn • Sleep Inn • Clarion • Cambria Suites • Mainstay Suites • Suburban • Econolodge • Rodeway Inn • Ascend Hotels Now, this is by no means a dig at Choice Hotels. Fortunately, there are several techniques for clearing up ambiguity in PPC. Don’t Bid on One-Word Keywords This is going to be your best bet for steering clear of those irrelevant and ambiguous meanings.
But let’s do a reality check.
Creative Testing For the Advanced Search Marketer, Part 1. In a search landscape where millions of keywords define intent, generating the most compelling creative can prove to be a daunting task.
Understanding your audience and formulating a message might be easy, but packaging up that message within the narrow limits of a 130 character creative can be a challenge. For paid search programs both big and small, creative optimization remains one of the single most impactful strategies for increasing traffic, lowering costs and acquiring more revenue. To optimize creative, search marketers rely on testing. Continuously generating, analyzing and iterating on new creative delivers incremental improvements in keyword-to-creative relevancy. Furthermore, testing helps marketers discover more compelling creative messaging to increase visitor engagement with the conversion funnel after the click. But more importantly, compelling creative promotes higher conversion rates and more revenue.
Select An Appropriate Test Limit Opportunity Cost Test Keyword Tokens. Specifics Outperform Generalizations. Before we discuss anything, first guess which of these two ads outperformed the other: Which did you pick: ad A or Ad B?
Well, if you picked Ad A, you were right, as it boosted CTR by a whopping 190%! So what’s the secret? Two Reasons: Ad A gave the reader specific, imaginable functions and benefits (“Track Mentions, RT’s & More”), while Ad B stuck with generalities (“Find Out [How Your Twitter is Performing] & Improve w/ [Brand]“), andAd A Featured a strong Call-to-Action that included the offer of a 30-Day Free Trial, while Ad B had no CTA or Free-Trial Offer to speak of. Why Free Trials Don’t Boost CTR As Much as You Might Think Now, it’s tempting to place all of the credit for the improved CTR on the Free Trial and Call-to-Action, but testing experience tells me that’s a mistake.
Why Imaginable Specifics Beat Out Generalities So if the free trial and CTA aren’t the major driver, then that leaves the specifics vs. the generalities. Comments comments. The recent adwords ad rotation change - an update. Last month we announced that we would be changing how creative rotation works in AdWords.
Specifically, we changed the even rotation setting to rotate evenly for a period of 30 days, after which AdWords would optimize to show your higher performing creatives more frequently. In the past month, we've heard a number of concerns from you about this change. Thank you for all of the feedback -- we've been listening carefully to determine the right course of action. The concerns have focused on (1) the lack of an opt-out for this change and (2) the potential that the 30 day even rotation window might be shorter than your testing window for new ads. You also inquired about why we made the change. First, we’d like to share a little more about why we updated how creative rotation works. Advertisement A has a 3% CTR, while Advertisement B has a 1% CTR. Also, in response to your feedback, we're planning to make two changes to the setting. Win of the Week: Clarity and Attention to Detail Increase CTR by 86%
Studying new winning ads is always fascinating because of the variety of products and services for which we're optimizing ad copy.
Every week, there is a new win ... in a new market ... for a new product. And yet, in spite of this variety and "newness," the principles of good ad writing prove themselves over and over again. With that in mind, which of the two ads below do you think performed better? The headlines and the URLs are the same. Only the body copy is different. I suppose it's not too difficult to pick the winner.