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In any marketing campaign, testing is essential for discovering the dos and don’ts of what truly resonates with your target audiences and allows even long standing advertising accounts to continually grow.

 

Testing. Testing. 1, 2, 3…

The foundation of PPC ad testing and optimisation.

Google Ads contains its own section of the interface specifically used for setting up experiments to make this as simple as possible. It’s typically hiding in the “show more” section.

Put simply, campaign experiments allow you to create a copy of an existing campaign and make any desired tweaks or changes, and split the budget between them. For example, if you want to test whether sending potential customers to a product detail page rather than the homepage on your website increases conversion rates, you can change the final URLs in the new campaign experiment to the alternative landing page and split the campaign’s budget between them.

Some more of the key variables to change and experiment with are:

  • Ad copy
  • Bid strategies
  • Landing pages
  • Ad extensions
  • Display URLs
  • Keywords & negative keywords
  • Ad scheduling
  • Targeting settings
  • Bid adjustments

Important note: 

You can make multiple changes across more than one variable in your test campaign. 

However,  keep in mind that the more variables you change and run within a test at the same time, the less clear it will be to know which change had the most impact on increasing or decreasing your performance.

 

A/B testing: It’s Science!

A/B testing with campaign experiments offer some unique advantages. For example, the ability to share a campaign budget alongside the original campaign. This means you don’t have to invest any additional spending or secure any additional budget in order to run your tests.

Plus, you have complete control over how that budget is split between the test and the original campaign. Whether that’s a 50/50 or 75/35.

On top of this, the experiment and control are both run at the same time. This limits the impact of outside variables on your results, such as seasonality giving clearer results.

Furthermore, Google indicates when certain metrics in your campaign experiment have reached statistical significance. This can help you analyse the results and decide when to end the experiment.

 

Easy Set up & tracking

Through this interface, you are easily able to keep track of and manage your various tests in one place. The new syncing experience allows you to adapt to any campaign fluctuations in real-time, improving your campaigns during the testing phase.

With the easy monitoring on the Experiments page, you can clearly point out a winner of any experiment and apply all changes within seconds.

These improvements in the user experience can advance your testing capabilities and enable you to run more tests, sometimes at a faster rate. You will be able to spend more time analysing and less time manually creating or drafting experiences.

 

Time To Test Yourself!

1. When signed in to Google Ads, look at your taskbar on the left and find the “Show more” tab. Scroll down once expanded until you see “Drafts & experiments” and proceed to “Campaign drafts”. Having a campaign draft is important as you will not be able to A/B test without it.

2. Once your campaign draft is complete, navigate over to campaign experiments.

3. Click the big, blue “+” near the top of the page.

4. Select your desired draft campaign and it will appear underneath. Be sure to name your experiment with a name that doesn’t share the same name as campaigns or other experiments.

5. Choose your start and end date for your experiment (if you want to manually end your campaign then select the “none” option).

6. If you want to carry out a typical A/B test, then be sure to keep the experiment split at 50% in order to ensure you are running a fair test.

7. Once you’ve done all of the above, you’re ready to save your campaign experiment and make it live.

 

Test Your Way To PPC Advertising Success

Using A/B testing to optimise your PPC/Google Ads accounts is pivotal in achieving higher conversion rates, which we know will lead to more sales – so it’s important to not overlook A/B testing when running your own campaigns.

Additionally, A/B tests are relatively easy to set up and very cost-effective when done correctly. It can lead to increased engagement, reduced bounce rates, improved web pages, and much more. The opportunities are virtually endless and the chance for refining your campaigns or website will be ever-present, you just need to find it!

 

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