A/B Testing

A/B Testing is a powerful way to improve your pay-per-click campaigns and help you with short-term and long-term goals. This type of testing lets you find out which ads are more successful and provide the best ROI (return on investment).

At the beginning of any new campaign, many advertisers will ask themselves, “what’s the best ad copy?” and “which keywords should I bid on?”. These questions are difficult to answer without any data about that specific account or industry. Instead of guessing which ad copy might work best, we recommend setting up an A/B test.

With A/B Testing, you can test different headlines, images, and ad text to see better performance with customers. Some things that might change in an experiment include the headline, keyword phrase, or image associated with your product or service. If one variation has higher conversion rates than another, it may be worth running for a more extended period. A/B Testing is an easy way to understand how advertising affects customer behavior and increases conversions.

In this blog post, we’ll go over how A/B testing can help you get better conversions and what it takes to set up an A/B test with Google Ads.

What is A/B Testing?

A/B Testing is a way to test different variations of one or more elements on your website to see which performs better. There are many reasons you might want to do this, but the most popular reason is that you’re trying to improve the conversion rate and make more money from each potential customer. The business goal of this tactic is to figure out which version performs better and use it as the new, optimized content for future campaigns.

Why Use PPC Ads Campaign

Do you have a business? Do you want to generate more leads and increase revenue? If so, then PPC advertising is the best way to do it. This type of marketing is all about bidding for specific or relevant keywords on search engines. PPC advertising is a great way to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, and generate sales.

One benefit of using this method is that there are many different sources to find your target audience. PPC ads are great for targeting a warm audience that’s ready to buy. When you use them, your ad won’t show up on cold audiences instead of buying your products or services. If someone clicks on one of these ads, they’ll be taken directly to a webpage on your site where they can learn more about the product or service advertised.

Tips on how to get the most out of your Pay-Per-Click ROI with A/B Testing:

A/B Testing can be a very effective way to get more conversions from your pay-per-click campaigns. Here are some tips to help you get the most out of your PPC ROI with A/B Testing:

Follow PPC Strategies Best Practices

A/B Testing only works if you have been following the best practices for your industry.

Define the goal: What do you want to find out from your A/B tests? How will this information help to achieve your business goals? Once you have a specific campaign goal in mind, focus on creating an effective test plan and clearly define a successful experiment.

Define the metrics: There are a few different metrics you can choose from to measure the performance of your A/B test. This is important because it will allow you to determine the winner of your experiment.

Consider the following:

  • Conversion Rate
  • Return on Investment (ROI)
  • Click-through-rate
  • CPC (Cost-per-click)
  • Cost per Conversion
  • Video Views/Watch Time
  • ROAS (Return on ad spend)

Define a minimum level of success: Once you’ve determined what metric is most relevant for your business, create a minimum threshold that needs to be reached for an ad to be considered a success. If you have multiple keywords, ads, or landing pages to test, you may want to create different minimum levels of success for each test.

Test one variable at a time: You can set up an A/B test to test one variable at a time or test multiple variables simultaneously. This will allow you to determine which ads perform better than others quickly and will enable you to spend more time trying and less time setting up your next experiment. If you want, you can always create your next experiment by adding another ad element (headline, text, images) to the current experiment.

Don’t STOP too soon: If you stop running a variation too quickly, you won’t have enough data to determine which ads perform better. It can be tempting to stop your test as soon as one of the variations starts producing better results than the other ad element on your page. If the difference is only marginal and it’s still possible for the other ad element to win, you should let your test run longer.

Don’t OVERDO your A/B Testing: Spending too much time on your experiment can distract you from other important marketing initiatives. You can also spend too much money testing, and not enough traffic is converting into customers. Testing too many variables at one time may produce inconclusive results or skew the data by confusing which test element was most responsible for creating the conversion.

Find the keywords your prospects use to search and bid on those

Keywords and key terms are a crucial step to any paid search campaign, regardless of your industry or business model. You should start by finding long-tail keywords that are relevant to your product or service. These keywords should be specific enough to find your target prospect but vague enough that you won’t just show up for your business name.

Automatic Bidding Strategy

You can make your bid strategy more dynamic by including automatic adjustments to the cost per click or conversion. You can have a high-quality campaign without worrying about overspending, which means more time to focus on other aspects like content strategy and conversion optimization!

Find Out The Negative Keywords List

Do you have a PPC digital advertising campaign? If yes, then it’s imperative to include negative keywords. The negative keyword list is an integral part of the equation when looking for high ROI. The negative keyword will prevent irrelevant clicks or traffic from being directed to your site, which can help you avoid spending money on clicks that are unlikely to convert into customers or leads.

Create custom landing pages for your ads

Your ads should send your prospects to a landing page relevant to their search query and contains the information they are looking for. Make sure that your landing pages don’t have any broken links or display unrelated content. This will help ensure higher relevance scores (Google Quality Score), leading to lower CPCs for those high-performing keywords when they show up in a paid search auction.

Test Your PPC Ad Copy

Headline: Experiment with different headlines to see which one resonates most with your audience. Headlines should be written to grab attention and communicate the benefit of clicking on your ad. Google allows advertisers to use headlines within their ad text, which gives them 40 more characters than the description of your PPC google ads. You should always include a strong headline that answers what someone is searching for and entices them to click on your ad or website link. If possible, try to use a question or statement that will give you an edge over the competition.

Ad text: This is a great place to use storytelling, testimonials, and benefits that answer what prospects are looking for and entice them to click on your ad. Use ad groups with similar products to test call-to-action text. This is an easy way to find out which calls-to-action work best for your conversion goals.

Images: You can also use ad groups with similar products to test image size and placement. You can try different images with your headline or experiment with the same photo in different sizes.

Description: Google gives you 160 characters to promote the benefits of clicking on your ad. You should use this space to create a sense of urgency and present your best offer within this small snippet.

Display URL: Keep your display URLs simple and relevant to the search query. You can use different URLs to create multiple versions of a single page. You should make sure that each URL is SEO-friendly and relevant for the landing page.

Test Other Elements of Your PPC Ad

Demographics and Audience selection: Is your ad reaching the right audience? You can find out which demographic performs best for your product or service by creating multiple versions of your ads. Tools available through Google, Bing, and Facebook allow you to target your ads based on demographics outside the search query. You can use this option to focus your ad dollars towards a target audience or geographic region.

Ad extensions: Google allows you to add extensions that show up with your text ad. These will enable you to highlight important information about your business and help boost conversion rates.

Geographic location: You can target your ads based on geographic location. You should use this option if you only want to show your ad to people in a specific area or country.

Call-to-action buttons or text: Use this option to test different calls-to-action based on the search term your target audience is using. If you sell a particular product, use “buy” or another strong call to action to generate sales through the Google Ads PPC campaign.

Mobile vs. desktop: Use this option to test whether your ads perform better on mobile or desktop devices. You can use the Google Trends tool to determine which ad performs best for different search queries.

Ad scheduling: Use this option if you want your ad displayed at specific times throughout the day, week, month, etc. This is helpful when you are trying to target people based on location and schedule. If you are looking to generate more leads, you might want to test your ad copy during the morning hours when people start their day. If you are looking for conversions on an e-commerce website, weekday afternoons or evenings may be better timed to show your ads because these are peak internet browsing times.

Targeting options: Google advertisers a variety of targeting options based on search behavior. You should test these options to see which option generates the most conversions for your business goals (more leads, more sales).

Dynamic keyword insertion: Use this option if you want specific keywords or phrases within your ad text to be dynamic and change based on what people are searching for. If your product or service is relevant to multiple searches, you can create different ads for each search query.

Seasonal factors: Use this option only if your product or service is specific to a particular time of year. For example, you might want to create holiday-related ads for Christmas and Thanksgiving.

Test different price points: If you’re selling a product or service, it’s crucial to test various price points (minimum or maximum price). Sometimes the same ad copy and landing page will perform better with one price point over another. However, you have to be careful about the cost-per-click and determine your target cost. Sometimes the company with the lowest cost per click might not get you the best results.

Analyze the ads Results

Once you have multiple ads performing well, it’s time to find out which ad copy performs best for your business. This will help you know which ads are most successful at driving conversions and sales through Adwords PPC ads. You can use Google Analytics or another third-party analytics tool to track conversion rates, CTRs, CPC, etc. If one of your campaigns is not generating the expected results, use this option to test new ad copy and keywords.

Once you’ve analyzed the data and found an ideal combination of factors that work for your business, you can save that combination of elements as a template to use for future ads.

You can use Google Analytics or another third-party analytics tool like Optimizely to track your overall campaign costs like conversion rates, CTR (clickthrough rate), CPC costs (cost per click) for each of your Adwords PPC campaigns.

Never Give Up

Sometimes ads will not work the first time. If this happens, do not give up! When one of your campaigns is not generating the expected results, use another option to test new ad copy and keywords. Once you’ve analyzed the data and found an ideal combination of factors that work for your business, you can save that combination as a template to use for future ads.

Once again, there’s no magic formula for success in pay-per-click advertising on the Google Adwords PPC platform, but testing out different options will help improve ROI over time. You have nothing to lose by creating multiple ads or targeting specific regions with geo-location to find what works best. The more target audience you receive from these methods, the higher the quality score (which directly correlates with lower advertising costs), which means even more savings in the long term.

Conclusion

A/B Testing is a great way to improve your pay-per-click ROI. With the specific steps we’ve outlined for you and some time to implement them into your PPC campaigns, you’ll soon see an increase in ROI.

Implementing these principles will help you discover what works best with your audience and how to scale it down the road. Do any of these tips seem like they would work well for your business? If so, reach out to our team today! We’re excited to get started on improving your ROI together.

Need more help with your PPC campaign? Contact us today!