ClickEquations Blog

A few weeks ago, Google clarified one of the many mysteries of the role landing pages play in the calculation of quality score, with the announcement that site quality policy violations would now be reported via a new message in the status column in the AdWords keywords report.

Google wants anyone who clicks on a paid search ad to be treated well before and after their click. Anything which they believe could reduce the quality of that experience is considered grounds for lowering your quality score. By doing this they hope to reduce the number of people who see your ads, the prominence they achieve on result pages, and make a few bucks by charging you a ‘bad advertiser’ tax.

Historically, all types of ‘bad experience’ issues were designated as ‘poor landing page quality’ even if the word ‘landing page’ was just being used as a code word for all kinds of potential post-click issues. These included technical issues about your website, user experience issues (some of which are on the landing page) plus any concerns they might have had about your business model or even the market or industry in which you do business.

The result was when your landing page quality was listed as ‘poor’ it was very hard to know why or what to do about it.

The recent change makes things much clearer. AdWords now separates ‘Policy’ issues from ‘Experience’ issues, in terms of how and where they’re documented and the impact they have on your account and quality score. This is a big improvement.

Policy Violations

Any violation of the AdWords ‘landing page and site policy guidelines‘ now results in your entire site in being suspended from AdWords, a fact that will be clearly marked next to each keyword in your AdWords account.

These guidelines cover all the bad stuff – malware, phishing, counterfeit goods, etc. – as well as the many more subjective topics covered in both the ‘software principles‘ and ‘webmaster guidelines‘.

Experience Problems

This leaves landing page qualty to focus only on items that might make a user experience poor, but are not strictly against any of the three lists of rules that are considered ‘policy’. This includes things like load time, about-us and privacy-policy pages, the presence of original content and limitations on the number of ads.

These or other experience problems now result in a landing page rating of ‘poor’ in the recently-named ‘keyword diagnosis’ thought bubble that appears in AdWords. A poor landing page rating will depress quality scores, often dramatically.

I assume (haven’t been able to explicitly confirm this) that it’s also still true that poor landing pages can impact your quality scores beyond for just the keywords that are sending traffic to those pages. In other words, landing pages with a ‘poor’ rating really need to get fixed as soon as possible because it can be dragging down scores across your entire account.

Not Clear Yet

Separating policy issues from experience issues is very helpful. Taking the dramatic action of suspending all keywords for policy violations makes it clear when there is something wrong and so we can assume if keywords are running that there are no policy violations. That is a long list of problems to be able to not worry about.

There remains a lot of room for improvement and clarity to the lists on both sides. The bad stuff in the site policy guidelines are clear and anyone doing anything that even looks like those activities should be banned. On the other hand, the webmaster guidelines are full of material that ranges from vauge and subjective to just plain silly.

On the landing page experience side, we have clarity about page-load speed (don’t be in the bottom 1/3 of sites in your area, see Webmaster Tools for speed info) but a lot of the other suggestions for a high quality landing page are good guidelines but lack sufficient clarity. Many people  get ding’d for these things they can’t put their finger one, and would appreciate a lot more detail and clear examples of what is acceptible and what is not.

Another Great Change

It’s good to see Google making changes like the isolation of site policy. The other helpful and related change they’ve made is the new adwords support phone numbers for all advertisers. In theory this gives people who get penalized for either site policy or user experience a place to go for answers when either mistakes are made or the root problem is unclear.

Quality Score in High Resolution

This post is based on material from Quality Score in High Resolution, a new book that details the workings and secrets of AdWords quality score. Learn more and order your copy today.

Craig has put together the definative book that will help you to undertstand and improve your quality scores. This is a must read book for anyone concerned about their AdWords’s performance.”
- Brad Geddes, Certified Knowledge

I’ve been at SMX Advanced in London for the last few days, in part talking about quality score. The one recurring question I heard was about the best way to scale a new account in a way that would maximize quality score.

The worst way to do it, which seems to be the default method, is to just drop thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of keywords into new accounts and just turn them on. This generally produces really poor results, and may create damage to the account from which it might never recover.

The reason why you don’t want to do this will be clear after we discuss the right way to build and scale a new account.

Starting On The Right Foot

The ideal way to build a new account is to add a small number of initial keywords, allow them to earn good or great quality scores and for those scores to stabilize, and to then add another batch of keywords, allow those to earn good or great quality scores and to stabilize, and then keep repeating this process until the entire initial account build and expansion is complete.

The reason this iterative approach is best, is that it allows your account to develop a history – a positive history – across all the CTR measures that quality score depends on. You want to build this history slowly and carefully, building a base strong enough to eventually support your entire account.

For a brand new account, with a domain that has never been advertised on AdWords before, Google has no existing history or reputation on which to determine initial quality scores. In this case they will look at the performance history and experience that other advertisers have had with the keywords you choose (assuming you’re not the first advertiser to ever bid on those terms) but they will be cautious given your lack of account history, ad copy history, display URL history, etc. and so keywords will very often start with extremely low quality scores – 2s, 4s, and 5s, are common.

But actual performance is monitored closely. If these keywords can show over the course of their first few hundred and thousand impressions, that they can earn competitive click-through rates as compared to other advertisers, the quality scores will rise quickly. This solid performance starts building a reputation for the account by way of a lifetime account CTR history, a performance history for ad copy, a performance history for the display URLs those ads are using, as well as demonstrating whatever geographical performance patterns may be typical in your case.

In each case, a fact-based history is better than an unknown. AdWords will use this more certain base, and hopefully track record of success, to base each quality score recalculation – which of course happens every time a keyword enters a search auction.

Given the importance of this first layer of base, it should include only your strongest keywords. Brand keywords are the best bet IF you have a recognizable brand that will earn typical ‘brand-level’ CTRs of 10% or higher. If your brand is an unknown and will gain low search volumes and potentially low click-through rates then you may not want to start with your brand, or at least include only a few core versions of it and instead go with a set of ‘short tail’ keywords that have a better chance of high CTR.

If you’ve run a version of this account before, or worked with similar keywords for another advertiser, leverage that experience to choose a strong set of high CTR keywords to launch your account. Don’t start with broad ‘head’ keywords that include category names and the like, because they tend to not earn good CTRs. Specific keywords where you’ve got some special attractiveness – a feature, a better offer, unique content like reviews or something you can promise in the ad copy to really drive great CTR. Put your best foot forward.

I would probably start with between 20 to 50 keywords, and lean to the low side of that range if possible. This sounds like an impossibly low number of keywords when your goal is to build an account with hundreds of thousands or millions of keywords. But even the largest skyscrapers start with relatively small foundations. We’ll discuss scaling in a moment, but the risk to focus on here is a poor start that will permanently cripple the account forever. If you can’t come up with that number of high CTR keywords and quickly earn quality scores of 7 or higher, maybe AdWords isn’t for you or this business.

Next Steps

If you pick the right starting set of keywords, build the account on a sound organization and write good ad copy, you should see quality scores increase by the day and hit 7 or higher within a week. Impression volume is probably more important than time, and keep 1000 impressions per keyword in your head as the target volume to achieve.

Any keywords that stabilize at quality scores below 7 should be improved. Better ad copy, smaller ad groups, and a long hard look in the mirror where you ask yourself if you really deserve to bid on that keyword are in order. Don’t make changes before you have statistically significant data, but when you do don’t delay. Pause any keywords that can’t achieve at least 7s in this early stage.

Now you’re ready to add more keywords. Add enough keywords to double your impressions-per-week. Normally many of the keywords in the initial batch will be relatively high volume, so often this next set will include more than a doubling of the keyword count. The point is to not overwhem your base – if you’ve shown strong performance on 50,000 impressions-a-week worth of keywords, and earned good histories in all the CTR measures mentioned above, adding 1M impressions-a-week worth of keywords in one new batch will overwhelm the account. The base wouldn’t be strong enough to hold it. Doubling the impression count is reasonable. The numbers don’t have to be exact, just get as close as you can.

Watch your new batch of keywords closely. They may start at lower than optimal quality scores too, but should climb at least as fast as the first set, and probably faster. When the second set has achieved about 1000 impressions for most of the keywords and demonstrated the ability to earn quality scores 7 or higher in nearly or every case, you can move on to batch #3.

Building Your Skyscraper

You can feel comfortable doubling the average number of impressions-per-week with every new set of keywords added to the account. At this pace your history will provide a strong base to help the new keywords leverage your past success and the new set are unlikely to weaken the base even if they contain some poor performers.

Use this time and opportunity however to be a harsh judge of performance and work to improve or pause any isolated keywords that get stuck with low quality scores. It’s better to work on them now while they’ve got your attention and haven’t started dropping your average performance over long periods of time. A zero tolerance policy for any keyword that can’t get above a 6 – unless it has a strong business advantage (like being highly profitable despite the poor quality score) – is recommended.

At some point, you could probably increase the pace of additions if you’re working toward a particularly huge account. After 250,000 keywords are in and have earned good stable quality scores, a new crop with 2x or possibly 3x the impression volume could work. You’ve got to weigh the risk of weakening your patiently built base with the business expediance of getting the full account running.

Creating History and Reputation

This process is about building up a history in the signals that drive quality score. You can’t swagger into town as an unknown and expect the powers-that-be to trust you as you start doing big business in forty locations on your first day. Better to start small, show them you know what you’re doing, and scale on top of the initial reputation you develop.

Metaphors aside, you need an account CTR history that suggests that you know how to buy keywords and write text ads. Note that if AdWords ads have been pointed at your root domain in the past even from another account, there will be some historical residue to overcome. Beyond the account history there is history to build for every visible target URL, for all the geographies where you’ll market, and with each keyword, ad copy, combination thereof, and even search queries. Slow. And. Steady. Wins. The. Race.

Revising History

All of the above is great, if you’ve got a brand new AdWords account. If that horse has already left the barn, then you need to apply these same principles in a different way. That’s not necessarily easy depending on the history the account has, so we’ll cover that topic in a blog post here next week.

Quality Score in High Resolution

This post is based on material from Quality Score in High Resolution, a new book that details the workings and secrets of AdWords quality score. Learn more and order your copy today.

Craig has put together the definative book that will help you to undertstand and improve your quality scores. This is a must read book for anyone concerned about their AdWords’s performance.”
- Brad Geddes, Certified Knowledge

Text ad writing and testing is simple to understand, relatively easy to execute, yet full of many subtleties that influence success.

If you want proof, just look at last weeks Text Ad Optimization Q&A series. Our experts share a wide range of opinions in their answers to 5 text ad testing questions, including more than a few disagreements and contradictions:

1. What are the biggest text ad testing mistakes?
2. How do pick which ads to test first?
3. What factors have the greatest influence on testing?
4. How important is text ad testing in overall campaign optimization?
5. Have you had any surprising text ad testing results?

I’ve collected all of the answers into the Text Ad Testing Master’s Guide. You can download the PDF (no registration) read the embedded guide below.

If you’re short on patience or time, I also pulled together my favorite 3 answers to each of the questions in the Best of the Text Ad Testing Q&A listed below.

If you liked the series, check out The Ultimate List of PPC Ad Testing Resources. This is our latest post to celebrate the launch of Text Ad Zoom. To see that and all of the other great ClickEquations features in action, request a demo or email sales@clickequations.com.

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Text Ad Testing Master’s Guide

Click here to download this guide (PDF, no registration).

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Best of Text Ad Testing Q&A

#1 What are some of the biggest mistakes people make in text ad testing (aside from only measuring CTR changes)?

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Brad Geddes: I don’t think enough people focus on Profit Per Impression. Just by choosing the lowest CPA or highest converting rate ad, does not mean you will bring in the most revenue for your account. Another mistake is not having enough data before making decisions. There are too many online calculators where you can input some very low numbers (like 15 impressions and 1 click for one ad and 10 clicks and 15 impressions for another one) and the tool will tell you that you have a winner. Although, the number one mistake is not doing it at all. Ad copy testing is so easy that everyone should always be running a few tests at any one time.

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Andrew Goodman: I often hear: “test only one variable at a time.” Statistically, this really makes no sense, and more than that, it’s impractical. From a statistical standpoint, if you go in and try to isolate which of two calls to action are “better,” for starters, you’re ignoring variable interactions (once anything else you want to test has to be changed, you’re now assuming the winner from the previous test would interact most favorably with the changed conditions) and you’re ignoring the opportunity costs of the other tests you could be running. People will interpret this “test little things one at a time” maxim so literally, they will take forever to optimize properly. What this approach fails to see is how blinkered it makes you. “Is ‘buy now’ or ‘buy today’ a better call to action?” Maybe they’re about the same, or maybe what you’ve just done is rule out a different style of ad that took more room talking about pricing or a third party endorsement, or some other trigger. There is absolutely nothing wrong with bolder testing of three or four very different style of ad, to see if any of these create a significantly better response. For some reason, that sounds unscientific to some people, but you don’t create marketing results by spending your time in the wrong chapters of the wrong statistics textbooks.

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Jeff Sexton: Well, perhaps the biggest mistake is NOT optimizing ad text – or doing some testing and then adopting a “set it and forget it” mindset.

But, assuming that people are actively testing their ad text, the next biggest mistake is not thinking past the keywords to get at the searcher intention BEHIND those keywords.  Behind every set of keywords are people who are searching on those keywords in response to a need, problem, or question.  Optimizing ad text means writing ads that better speak to those people on the other end of the screen.

So you should be looking at actual searcher queries associated with those keywords, past test results, competitive ads and landing pages, etc. in order to actively seek out an understanding of searcher mindset.  Once you have that hypothesis you’ll be able to write ads on a more coherent basis and also able to interpret test results on a more scientific basis.  In other words, proving or disproving a hypothesis will give you a direction on “what to try next” after each test, whether winning or losing.  This will also allow you to more intelligently apply other ad writing best practices.

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#2 How do you pick which text ads to test first?

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Jessica Niver: If I run into time constraints (can you imagine?), I focus my energy on: high CPL-high conversion ad groups, high conversion, high-competition ad groups regardless of CPL. For ecommerce clients, any ad groups with multiple sale offers that change frequently or that can be tested against one another. I’d also keep a list of ad groups that have a high seasonal/holiday bias and make sure those are focused on at the right time of year/month as well. Also low-CTR, low-quality score ad groups though those often need work on keyword-ad relevancy more than just ad text testing. Because it’s testing, the ads you add won’t always improve performance immediately. Maybe they suck and you shouldn’t use that messaging and that’s what the test shows you. So in spite of the above I try not to test in all of my high-lead or high-revenue ad groups simultaneously to maintain a performance safety zone so I don’t completely damage my clients’ shorter-term performance if something goes unexpectedly.

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Erin Sellnow: For regular testing, I tend to focus on my underperforming ad groups first. Ones with a low CTR or quality score, as I need to improve their performance in order to better the entire account. If I am looking to do some general experimenting though, I will look at my high traffic ad groups first, so I can get baseline results quickly. From there I can tweak the test with other ad groups, but at least I know if the general idea if going to work or not without waiting for months to get results.

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Tom Demers:

• Cost – Which groups are spending the largest amount? These are the areas where testing and even small percentage growth in areas like conversion and click-through rate on your ads can have a large impact.
• Opportunity for Improvement – Larger groups that have indicators of problem ads like low CTRs, low Quality Scores across the board, or low conversion rates can be good candidates for optimization. Another good thing to look at here are “internal benchmarks” or peer calculations.
• Time between test – Another thing we’ve found has been a great indication that ad copy can be working harder is when it’s been months (or years) between tests. There are really an infinite number of variations and approaches you can take to testing an ad, so a stale ad almost always offers a great opportunity to find a variation that will resonate better with prospects.

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#3 In your experience, what factors have the greatest influence in testing?

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Brad Geddes: The headline and display URL. I find that a strong headline can compensate for a weak description line 1. However, a strong description line 1 will not overcome a poor headline. I also think display URL is not tested enough. People like to know where they are going after the click, and the display URL tells the searcher where they will end up after the click. In fact, the instant previews that just rolled out for ads also shows that Google believes in this as well.

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Andrew Goodman: Fit and pain points. If you’re a particular kind of roof repair company then speed of response addresses your buyer’s concerns; same if you are overnighting fresh fish or meats. If you’re a store specializing in large shoe sizes, then selection and a return policy may be the key. Overall, you often just want to “drive it down the middle of the fairway,” so to speak, with obvious messages and minor adjustments. It’s as much staying away from any off-putting verbiage or symbolism, as it is convincing people of anything in that small space.

Ad position is arguably “the greatest” influence in testing, so the fact that you have the budget to reach premium position (combined with attention to CTR’s and your other campaign elements, aimed at higher Quality Score) can’t be divorced from the ad testing exercise. If you’re habitually down in positions 6-8 you may see very different testing dynamics than what you see in 1-2.

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Jessica Niver: Adding time-limited offers/sales, pricing in ads, offering a free anything of value (brochure, tool, etc.), prominently branding ad texts for non-branded ad groups (this has worked well for non-branded queries for better known brands).

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#4 How important is text ad testing in overall campaign optimization tasks?

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Brad Geddes: Essential. When you think of the reoccurring tasks that you must undertake in a paid search account, such as bidding, adding negative keywords, etc. – ad copy testing should be among the top tasks that are done at least monthly (the amount of testing you can do depends on how much data your account collects). When you change bids, you attain a short term gain in your account, but you will have to change bids again in the near future, so the gains are only temporary. When you do ad copy testing, the gains are long term.

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Brad Libby: Brad Geddes had a great blog post a couple of years ago where he laid out the basic search process, like:

Impressions –> (CTR) –> Clicks –> (CR) –> Conversions –> Revenue –> Profit

So, Clicks = Impressions x CTR

and Revenue = Conversions x Revenue_per_Conversion

I’ve attached a spreadsheet screenshot showing what I mean:

He then looked at what, say a 10% increase in Impressions would do to profit compared to a 10% decrease in CPC, and so forth, to show whether you should worry more about increasing Impressions or cutting CPC (this sort of leaves out considering which of those two things is easier to achieve).

The overall lesson I took away was that searches basically a linear process – every step is necessary for searchers to move from the query to the page visit to the purchase. I love bashing Craig Danuloff when he says things like “bidding is maybe 10% or 20% of PPC”. No – if all of your bids are set optimally, then bidding is 0% of your problem. If they are all set horribly, then it’s basically 100% of your problem.

So, if you’re using only 1 ad format for all of your ad groups (“Looking for [query]? We’ve got [query] at low, low prices!”), then ad testing is very important for you.  If you’re doing it well, it should not be a big issue.

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Crosby Grant: Text Ad testing falls somewhere after bidding and account structure & keywords, somewhere near negatives.  Of course, every account is different, but in a new account for example, you want to get your structure and keywords right, and your bidding up and running, prior to taking on the optimization tasks that will get you further along.

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#5 Have you had any surprising text ad testing results?

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Andrew Goodman: Absolutely. We discover many things. Being “in business for 50 years” can come across as a negative — but being “online since 1997″ is a positive. I recently tried an ad that explained how users need to scroll to see a category of product, because the client’s site has a poor experience! That doubled conversion rates! You might learn that saying a food item is “delicious” doesn’t help, but calling it “crunchy” does. You do have to keep testing, because it’s really hard to predict what works.

I was gobsmacked when I heard of Jeremy Schoemaker’s claim that the winning ad could just be the one that had a certain *shape* — an “arrow shaped ad”!!

http://www.shoemoney.com/2007/02/06/google-adwords-arrow-trick-to-increase-click-through-rates/

I’ve incorporated this gently into some ad tests, and I am pretty sure I’ve seen it working from time to time, for no discernible reason other than just that: the shape.

I also strip ads to the bone, trying the game of “shortest ad wins”. Sometimes, it does. I believe this speaks to the cognitive process of users, and also perhaps the minimalism of it flatters searchers who have had enough with the busyness of web pages and the excessive claims and information overload purveyed by the overstuffed world of marketing.

Seth Godin has a notion of helping natural selection along in organizations, by “increasing the mDNA diversity” (meme DNA) to allow for serendipity. You’ll never make cool discoveries without accidents, multiple sets of eyes, and even “lazy” ads that people just toss up on the board without overthinking. (Remember how Google’s founders came up with the “ingenious” Google UI because they “weren’t designers and don’t do HTML”?)

Having multiple sets of eyes and people with diverse perspectives and expertise trying ad experiments can be a plus for sure

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Chad Summerhill: I got 12% overall lift in my brand campaign by adding the ® symbol campaign-wide.

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Jessica Niver: Most of my surprising results have revolved around how much different offers (50% off vs. buy one get one free vs. free shipping) impact CTR and conversion rate. I guess it’s logical, but to watch things fluctuate so drastically as a result of changes really demonstrated how important it is to test those things and implement what customers want to me. Also, testing the timing of launch for seasonal or holiday-based ads has been a lesson in how dramatically their performance can change and the importance both of using those types of ads to your advantage and getting them out of your account before they lose value.

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Learn More About The Authors

• Brad Geddes – Certified Knowledge
• Andrew Goodman – PageZero
• Jessica Niver – Hanapin Marketing
• Chad Summerhill – PPC Prospector
• Amy Hoffman – Hanapin Marketing
• Erin Sellnow – Hanapin Marketing
• Pete Hall – Room 214, a social media agency
• Ryan Healy – BoostCTR / RyanHealy.com
• Jeff Sexton – BoostCTR / JeffSextonWrites.com
• Tom Demers – BoostCTR / MeasuredSEM
• Bradd Libby – The Search Agents
• Crosby Grant – Stone Temple Consulting
• Rob Boyd – Hanapin Marketing
• Greg Meyers – SEMGeek / iGesso
• Bonnie Schwartz – SEER Interactive
• John Lee – Clix Marketing
• Jon Rognerud – JonRognerud.com
• Joe Kerschbaum – Clix Marketing

This week, we’re celebrating the release of Text Ad Zoom with a 5 part Q&A series featuring the authors who wrote the articles highlighted in The Ultimate List of PPC Ad Testing Resources. Each day this week, we had a different question and the answers.

Previous, we asked:

1. What are the biggest text ad testing mistakes?
2. How do pick which ads to test first?
3. What factors have the greatest influence on testing?
4. How important is text ad testing in overall campaign optimization?

Read below for the final question in our 5 part series and answers (in no particular order).

Want to see Text Ad Zoom and all of the other great ClickEquations features in action? Request a demo or email sales@clickequations.com.

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Text Ad Optimization Q&A #5: Have You Had Any Surprising Text Ad Testing Results?

Brad Geddes: I can’t count the number of times I was surprised by results. I’ve seen ads that I thought were terrible and should easily be beaten in a test and the ‘terrible’ ads worked surprisingly well. I did a test with one company where we just changed a single letter in an ad copy. We made a singular word plural as we were wondering if that would help increase overall average sale amounts. That test failed miserably and the plural version had a much worse conversion rate than the singular word. It taught us a lot about the shoppers, so it was a good test to have run as it helped us design some different landing pages.

My overall thoughts are that whenever I say, “I think this will work” means I don’t really know and that we should instead test it instead. Leave the ego outside of the account. Run some ad copy tests and let the metrics tell you what’s best for your account’s profits.

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Andrew Goodman: Absolutely. We discover many things. Being “in business for 50 years” can come across as a negative — but being “online since 1997″ is a positive. I recently tried an ad that explained how users need to scroll to see a category of product, because the client’s site has a poor experience! That doubled conversion rates! You might learn that saying a food item is “delicious” doesn’t help, but calling it “crunchy” does. You do have to keep testing, because it’s really hard to predict what works.

I was gobsmacked when I heard of Jeremy Schoemaker’s claim that the winning ad could just be the one that had a certain *shape* — an “arrow shaped ad”!!

http://www.shoemoney.com/2007/02/06/google-adwords-arrow-trick-to-increase-click-through-rates/

I’ve incorporated this gently into some ad tests, and I am pretty sure I’ve seen it working from time to time, for no discernible reason other than just that: the shape.

I also strip ads to the bone, trying the game of “shortest ad wins”. Sometimes, it does. I believe this speaks to the cognitive process of users, and also perhaps the minimalism of it flatters searchers who have had enough with the busyness of web pages and the excessive claims and information overload purveyed by the overstuffed world of marketing.

Seth Godin has a notion of helping natural selection along in organizations, by “increasing the mDNA diversity” (meme DNA) to allow for serendipity. You’ll never make cool discoveries without accidents, multiple sets of eyes, and even “lazy” ads that people just toss up on the board without overthinking. (Remember how Google’s founders came up with the “ingenious” Google UI because they “weren’t designers and don’t do HTML”?)

Having multiple sets of eyes and people with diverse perspectives and expertise trying ad experiments can be a plus for sure.

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Jessica Niver: Most of my surprising results have revolved around how much different offers (50% off vs buy one get one free vs free shipping) impact CTR and conversion rate. I guess it’s logical, but to watch things fluctuate so drastically as a result of changes really demonstrated how important it is to test those things and implement what customers want to me. Also, testing the timing of launch for seasonal or holiday-based ads has been a lesson in how dramatically their performance can change and the importance both of using those types of ads to your advantage and getting them out of your account before they lose value.

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Chad Summerhill: I got 12% overall lift in my brand campaign by adding the ® symbol campaign-wide.

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Amy Hoffman: Each month at Hanapin we have an internal training day.  Sometimes we’ll play a game called ‘Which Ad Won?’; in which, we’ll show two ads side by side for the same ad group and everyone has to guess which performed better.  There are always surprising cases.  It really just depends on your audience.  Sometimes a rhetorical question wins, a strong call to action, or a mixture of the two.  It really proves the importance of both knowing your audience and testing different techniques.

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Erin Sellnow: Nothing that really shocked me, but over time I have found DKI is very hit and miss. For some clients, it does wonders, but for other clients it is like I can’t even pay people enough to click on a DKI ad. I can’t ever seem to predict correctly on if it is going to work well or not.

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Pete Hall: Definitely. I’ve written ads that I personally thought were sub-par (no clear CTA, not really relevant, DKI-heavy, etc.) and watched them outperform my “perfect” ads by leaps and bounds. You have to remember that just because you think your ad is perfect, chances are most everyone else won’t, and nor do they care. It’s all about standing out in the competition for the user click.

If you work on an account for long enough, you start to test everything you can with text ads and these can make a big difference. A good example of this is testing display URL variations, such as adding www. or not, or adding things after the domain name, i.e. /Free, and seeing big differences in results.

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Ryan Healy: Absolutely. Happens all the time. Although the more I write ads and analyze why one ad won and one ad lost, it becomes easier. You start to see patterns at work, principles at play.

But the surprises never stop. That’s one reason testing is so important. It provides you with empirical evidence of what’s working… right this minute… in your market.

That’s very valuable information to have.

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Jeff Sexton: As indicated in the previous answer, it’s actually fairly routine to be surprised with test results.  And I think that anyone involved with any sort of Web copy or Website Optimization testing will tell you that being surprised by a set of results is not only uncommon, but a pretty routine occurrence.  Nobody bats a thousand when it comes to optimization of any kind, and I think that’s especially true for Text Ad optimization.

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Tom Demers: A lot of times the things that surprise me the most are the tests that don’t win. A type of test I see frequently is this:

• A generic, keyword focused ad that speaks to a search query but is pretty vanilla is set up
• The copywriter comes up with a really clever, attention-grabbing approach that doesn’t include the keyword but seems to be a much more thoughtful approach to the creative
• The clever new approach gets clobbered by the simple, boring use of the keyword in the title and a straight-forward value proposition and call to action

We also cover a lot of ad tests on our blog (one per week) and a common theme I see there that surprises people is just that small changes lead to big impacts.

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Crosby Grant: You bet! There was the ad where we intentionally misspelled things.  I wish I had an example handy.  It was just jarring enough that we got a little lift in CTR.  At the time I think we were advertising for a certain post-secondary-education-for-profit (an online school), who shall remain nameless.  I think it could be said that the ad was targeted to the audience

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Rob Boyd: I’ve had some interesting results but one example comes immediately to mind because it’s on one of my favorite client accounts. I hope I don’t offend them too much in the event they come across this post but I get to make fun of myself a bit too.

I recently took on a client that had grown their PPC accounts spend to several hundred thousand dollars a month and had done so with absolutely no conversion or revenue tracking. They had been making decision based on feel for well over a year, with what adds up to millions of dollars. You can imagine the mayhem that presented itself when we turned the lights on and got tracking up and running…not pretty. There weren’t many things that they were doing right but the account was close enough that we turned it around very quickly. The one area where I can give them high praise is in their ad writing. I’ve been managing the account for over 4 months now and I have yet to create an ad that outperforms the ad structure they came up with long before we took on the account. It’s hard to imagine they got the recipe right without true goal metrics but, until I test an ad that beats it, I give them all the credit in the world! I think the lesson learned is that sometimes the client really does know their customer best.

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Greg Meyers: The use of the DKI in Ads has traditionally been a fast and easy way to try and get the best CTR%. But, that’s not really the case when dealing with conversions. Also, with the birth of Ad Extensions and Product Feeds in Ads, it’s been a little more difficult to pinpoint success stories. With that said, future Testing will require many more levels of intricacies.

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Bonnie Schwartz: Recently, I ran an ad copy test which was new ad vs. an ad that the client had been running in the account before we took over. The client’s ad was definitely decent, but it did not 100% follow best practices.  The main thing was that this ad did not have a clear call to action.  My test ad did.  However, my ad was the clear loser overall pretty much across all ad groups. This taught me a valuable lesson that best practices are great to keep in mind, but oftentimes do not hold true.  I think with ppc ad copy, small things you may not even think of, like the shape of the ad, the bold keywords, punctuation, may impact your ctr and conversion rate, beyond the actual messaging.  The most important thing is to test and let the numbers speak for themselves because I have been proven wrong many times based on what I thought would work and what actually did.

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John Lee: When I first started doing PPC, I was always surprised at how a simple change in punctuation or capitalization could affect the CTR and even the CVR of an ad. This doesn’t surprise me anymore, but it sure did then. More recently, Google changed how text ads are displayed in the top 3 spots. Essentially, when proper punctuation is included in line 1 of an ad, Google will place line 1 next to the headline making it look like an organic SERP listing. The initial results (positive) from this change surprised me. I wasn’t expecting users to be so easily fooled by the new PPC ads’ visual resemblance to organic listings!

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Jon Rognerud: Maybe not surprising – but using big numbers ($) to exclude people from clicking the ad showed us that we can “lower traffic” & “increase quality leads”. That is surprising to many in terms of strategy.

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Learn More About The Authors

• Brad Geddes – Certified Knowledge
• Andrew Goodman – PageZero
• Jessica Niver – Hanapin Marketing
• Chad Summerhill – PPC Prospector
• Amy Hoffman – Hanapin Marketing
• Erin Sellnow – Hanapin Marketing
• Pete Hall – Room 214, a social media agency
• Ryan Healy – BoostCTR / RyanHealy.com
• Jeff Sexton – BoostCTR / JeffSextonWrites.com
• Tom Demers – BoostCTR / MeasuredSEM
• Bradd Libby – The Search Agents
• Crosby Grant – Stone Temple Consulting
• Rob Boyd – Hanapin Marketing
• Greg Meyers – SEMGeek / iGesso
• Bonnie Schwartz – SEER Interactive
• John Lee – Clix Marketing
• Jon Rognerud – JonRognerud.com
• Joe Kerschbaum – Clix Marketing

This week, we’re celebrating the release of Text Ad Zoom with a 5 part Q&A series featuring the authors who wrote the articles highlighted in The Ultimate List of PPC Ad Testing Resources. Each day this week, we’ll have a different question and the answers.

Previous, we asked:

1. What are the biggest text ad testing mistakes?
2. How do pick which ads to test first?
3. What factors have the greatest influence on testing?

Read below for today’s question and answers (in no particular order).

Want to see Text Ad Zoom and all of the other great ClickEquations features in action? Request a demo or email sales@clickequations.com.

Text Ad Optimization Q&A #4: How Important is Text Ad Testing in Overall Campaign Optimization?

Brad Geddes: Essential. When you think of the reoccurring tasks that you must undertake in a paid search account, such as bidding, adding negative keywords, etc – ad copy testing should be among the top tasks that are done at least monthly (the amount of testing you can do depends on how much data your account collects). When you change bids, you attain a short term gain in your account, but you will have to change bids again in the near future, so the gains are only temporary. When you do ad copy testing, the gains are long term.

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Andrew Goodman: It’s probably the most important and most challenging area, one that often takes a back seat in campaign managers’ arsenals to the things users cannot see, like keywords and ad group structure.

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Jessica Niver: It’s as important as bid changing and a lot of the other things we tend to do more often. I think it’s ignored more often than it should be, but I also think that for some ad groups you’ll find bigger impacts than in others. For example (this is just my experience…) I’ve seen bigger conversion rate changes from testing in individual product ad groups than in my branded ad groups, possibly because the branded traffic was already very likely to click and then convert as long as they saw the proper brand name and needed less persuasion via ad text. And of course, I’ve seen bigger inconsistency in the value of ad text testing in ad groups with a lot of broad matched, poorly-organized keywords. Those ad groups just need to be cleaned up because you can’t control the relevance of searches very closely from one time period to the next, so ads that were relevant to the queries from “test period A” aren’t necessarily as relevant to queries in the next “test period”.

Long-term, ad text testing loses value unless you work to put value into it. It’s more important to be creative than people want to be because being creative is slow. Sometimes when you’ve been writing ads for a product or service for quite a while it’s easy to write boring ads without many distinguishing factors to test against one another. You have to set aside time to research your competition, research your client’s audience, and maybe get some insight from outside sources (client, coworkers?) to make distinctions that are really worth testing.

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Chad Summerhill: Very important. PPCers should be spending anywhere from 20%-50% of their time optimizing their ad copy.

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Amy Hoffman: Ad testing is very important.  It’s like fishing: your ad is your baited hook; your chance to grab a customer.  If you aren’t getting any bites, you’re probably fishing in the wrong water. e.g. You probably need to look long and hard at the keywords you’re targeting.  If they seem correct then check out your bait: is your ad text accurately representing your business?  If you get a few bites but they all get away, then you should take a look at your reeling techniques. e.g. There may be a disconnect between what you are selling and what you are promoting or you may have a faulty landing page.  At any rate, ad testing can give a lot of information regarding your account’s health and performance.  (Yes, yes I did just work a fishing analogy into this email. )

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Erin Sellnow: I personally think ad testing and landing page optimization are the two biggest bets for success. While all of the other optimizations are important, you will never see big gains unless you test new ads and landing pages.

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Pete Hall: Just as important as anything else, and really, that’s the great thing about PPC. There are so many moving parts that can affect KPI’s, and certainly text ad testing playing a huge role in that. The way I see it, if you aren’t testing new ads frequently, you’re doing your accounts a disservice. Especially after you properly set up any new campaigns, text ad testing is a critical long-term optimization tactic.

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Brad Libby: Brad Geddes had a great blog post a couple of years ago where he laid out the basic search process, like:

Impressions –> (CTR) –> Clicks –> (CR) –> Conversions –> Revenue –> Profit

So, Clicks = Impressions x CTR and Revenue = Conversions x Revenue_per_Conversion

I’ve attached a spreadsheet screenshot showing what I mean:

He then looked at what, say a 10% increase in Impressions would do to profit compared to a 10% decrease in CPC, and so forth, to show whether you should worry more about increasing Impressions or cutting CPC (this sort of leaves out considering which of those two things is easier to achieve).

The overall lesson I took away was that searches basically a linear process – every step is necessary for searchers to move from the query to the page visit to the purchase. I love bashing Craig Danuloff when he says things like “bidding is maybe 10% or 20% of PPC”. No – if all of your bids are set optimally, then bidding is 0% of your problem. If they are all set horribly, then it’s basically 100% of your problem.

So, if you’re using only 1 ad format for all of your ad groups (“Looking for [query]? We’ve got [query] at low, low prices!”), then ad testing is very important for you.  If you’re doing it well, it should not be a big issue.

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Ryan Healy: I believe it’s becoming more important than it’s ever been. This is because Google has been placing more and more emphasis on CTR.

In fact, AdWords experts have recently noticed that Quality Score is becoming less important while CTR is becoming more important.

To increase CTR, you must have a seamless market to message match. The “market” is made up of the searchers who type in the keywords you’re bidding on; the “message” is the ad.

Testing ad text has always been important, but it’s probably more important now than it’s ever been.

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Jeff Sexton: Incredibly important.  Ad Text plays a major role in determine CTR (and therefore Quality Score) and Conversion Rate.  I think that says it all, doesn’t it?

And as far as testing is concerned, the adage taken from direct response copywriting and Website Optimization still carries: “testing rules and opinion drools.”  I think anyone who will tell you that they can, with any real consistent accuracy, predict which ad text will win is kidding themselves – not to mention showing their ignorance.

In short, you’ve got to test and test rigorously in order to really know which ads perform best.  If you’re not doing that, you’re leaving money on the table – a lot of money.

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Tom Demers: I’m a bit biased, but I think it’s both crucial and under-utilized. Your ad copy is your first actual connection with your prospect, and is responsible for:

• Bringing in the right visitors
• Qualifying out the wrong type of traffic
• Tying together your targeting (keywords, demographics, etc.) and your offer (landing page).

Your ads are attempting to make a sufficiently enticing promise (more enticing than your competitors, and enticing enough to click on) to a searcher or visitor, but still have to make that promise something that the landing page can deliver on. This is a big job and there’s a lot of nuance and finesse in getting it right, and consistently iterating and refining this messaging can mean really big gains in traffic, leads, and ultimately sales.

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Crosby Grant: Text Ad testing falls somewhere after bidding and account structure & keywords, somewhere near negatives.  Of course, every account is different, but in a new account for example, you want to get your structure and keywords right, and your bidding up and running, prior to taking on the optimization tasks that will get you further along.

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Rob Boyd: I think that text ad testing is extremely important. If we get to the root of a text ad campaign and throw out all the bells and whistles available in todays PPC world (advanced targeting, ad extensions, etc), your options for optimization are ad testing, keyword expansion, campaign structure, and bids. At some point you are going to run into diminishing returns on keyword expansion and campaign structure. Eventually, your quality scores should be great and your structure should be an image of best practices. Ad testing, like bid optimization, can always have an impact on an account and should always be a high priority in overall optimization.

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Greg Meyers: I believe that preliminary Text Ad Testing should be done at the launch of a new campaign/ad group as part of the holistic PPC best practice. This test would consist of 2-3 completely different Ads. Once we start seeing performance metrics, then we do the traditional bid management, keyword expansions and then identify which Text Ads perform the best and then start the “In-depth” Testing Process. So Testing is important, but later in the game.

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Bonnie Schwartz: Ad testing is very important, especially considering the importance of QS on your overall metrics and the impact that CTR may have.  Oftentimes, I find it hard to achieve stat significance on my conversion rate.  In these instances, I choose the ad with the winning CTR because this may have an impact beyond just the number of clicks, as it may also lead to lower CPC’s overall for your account as CTR is a major factor in QS.

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John Lee: Ad testing ranks at the top – right up there with landing page optimization. Too many advertisers put too much focus on keywords and bids. The truth is that ad testing and landing page optimization are the elements that will have the biggest impact on improving conversion rate.

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Jon Rognerud: Viewing a campaign from “front” (google) to “back” (page/conversion) – the ad is the first touchpoint. It’s very important to get the attention of the user, i.e. ‘the click’. An awords campaign with a poor, low engaging ad will not serve you well.

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Joe Kerschbaum: Mission critical. You will eventually hit a ceiling in regards to your keyword list (or at least your head terms). However, you can always be testing your text ads in order to get better performance from your keywords. Your ads can be timely and timeless, so your tests are almost limitless.

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Learn More About The Authors

• Brad Geddes – Certified Knowledge
• Andrew Goodman – PageZero
• Jessica Niver – Hanapin Marketing
• Chad Summerhill – PPC Prospector
• Amy Hoffman – Hanapin Marketing
• Erin Sellnow – Hanapin Marketing
• Pete Hall – Room 214, a social media agency
• Ryan Healy – BoostCTR / RyanHealy.com
• Jeff Sexton – BoostCTR / JeffSextonWrites.com
• Tom Demers – BoostCTR / MeasuredSEM
• Bradd Libby – The Search Agents
• Crosby Grant – Stone Temple Consulting
• Rob Boyd – Hanapin Marketing
• Greg Meyers – SEMGeek / iGesso
• Bonnie Schwartz – SEER Interactive
• John Lee – Clix Marketing
• Jon Rognerud – JonRognerud.com
• Joe Kerschbaum – Clix Marketing

This week, we’re celebrating the release of Text Ad Zoom with a 5 part Q&A series featuring the authors who wrote the articles highlighted in The Ultimate List of PPC Ad Testing Resources. Each day this week, we’ll have a different question and the answers.

Previous, we asked:

1. What are the biggest text ad testing mistakes?
2. How do pick which ads to test first?

Read below for today’s question and answers (in no particular order).

Want to see Text Ad Zoom and all of the other great ClickEquations features in action? Request a demo or email sales@clickequations.com.

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Text Ad Optimization Q&A #3: What Factors Have The Greatest Influence in Testing?

Brad Geddes: The headline and display URL. I find that a strong headline can compensate for a weak description line 1. However, a strong description line 1 will not overcome a poor headline. I also think display URL is not tested enough. People like to know where they are going after the click, and the display URL tells the searcher where they will end up after the click. In fact, the instant previews that just rolled out for ads also shows that Google believes in this as well.

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Andrew Goodman: Fit and pain points. If you’re a particular kind of roof repair company then speed of response addresses your buyer’s concerns; same if you are overnighting fresh fish or meats. If you’re a store specializing in large shoe sizes, then selection and a return policy may be the key. Overall, you often just want to “drive it down the middle of the fairway,” so to speak, with obvious messages and minor adjustments. It’s as much staying away from any off-putting verbiage or symbolism, as it is convincing people of anything in that small space.

Ad position is arguably “the greatest” influence in testing, so the fact that you have the budget to reach premium position (combined with attention to CTR’s and your other campaign elements, aimed at higher Quality Score) can’t be divorced from the ad testing exercise. If you’re habitually down in positions 6-8 you may see very different testing dynamics than what you see in 1-2.

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Jessica Niver: Adding time-limited offers/sales, pricing in ads, offering a free anything of value (brochure, tool, etc), prominently branding ad texts for non-branded ad groups (this has worked well for non-branded queries for better known brands).

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Chad Summerhill: Search query/ ad text alignment, calls to action, benefits, differentiating from the other competitor ads.

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Amy Hoffman: Consistency among keywords and landing pages.   Make sure that all of the ads tested are relevant to the audience, the landing page, and every search query that could trigger the ad.   Ads in question should deliver users to the same landing page, or the results could be skewed by landing page quality.  Delivering users to a quality landing page with a high conversion rate will most likely give the most useful data as opposed to delivering users to a landing page with a low conversion rate.  If you don’t have a high quality landing page, you won’t know if users aren’t converting because the landing page stinks or if it was because of the ad text.

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Erin Sellnow: Ads with offers in them always do the best – get a free guide, save 20%, etc. as the user can quickly see what they gain by clicking. Don’t over-promise, as that will have a negative impact when it comes to conversions or time on site, but be sure to say why your page/website is the best.

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Pete Hall: Landing pages. You can do so much with ads, but really ads exist to drive clicks. To convert those clicks you need to dial in the landing pages. Your ads need to compel users to click and then set the user expectation for the landing page. This is even more important now that previews are implemented for AdWords ads in Google SERPs.

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Ryan Healy: If there is a secret to writing winning PPC ads, I’d have to say it’s clarity. In case after case, the winning ads I see use clearer language than the losing ads.

So if there’s a way to clarify your ad — and eliminate any kind of awkward or confusing words and phrases — then this is definitely something you want to test first.

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Tom Demers: The easy answers here in terms of the actual components of the ad are “the headline” and/or “the image” depending on the ad platform/format. That’s largely true, but in analyzing thousands of ad tests one of the biggest initial surprises for me was the impact relatively small changes like tweaking a single verb, including symbols, including (or excluding) price, etc.

Facebook ads are a great example: prevailing best practice wisdom with Facebook ads is that “it’s all about the image,” and the image is important, but we’ve run tests where we changed nothing but the copy of the ad and the percentage differences across large sets of ads were well into double digits. For me the moral of the story is that different components of an ad aren’t the key factors – things like:

• Being relevant or disruptive (depending on the context)
• Thinking your way into the mind of the searcher
• Having a lot experience seeing what works and doesn’t work in similar situations

Are the key factors in setting up tests that show large improvements.

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Crosby Grant:The creativity and savvy of the advertiser makes a big difference.  Creativity for trying new things, savvy for paying attention to the competition, the market, the seasons and holidays, etc.  But maybe a more literal answer would be about the ads themselves.  Certainly including the user’s search term in the Headline is a big bandied about a bit.  More important though is to get at what they actually searched for, rather than the literal term they searched for.  As an example, if someone searches for “I need divorce help”, a headline of “Divorce Attorney” is perfectly appropriate, and may perform better than “I need divorce help” as a Headline.  Having a strong call to action in the descriptions cannot be emphasized strongly enough.  It simply makes a big difference.  If your call to action is turning people away then quite often that is actually a good thing; they most likely were not going to take that action anyways.  Once less click for you to pay for.  Your domain name has a big influence too.  While it is often fairly set in stone, a good bit of advice for any would-be-entrepreneur would be to test out different domain names prior to getting locked in.  Just spend a few grand on PPC with identical ads pointing to different domains and pick the one that sticks.  (If you have been around since before 2006 or so, you may recall when you could use any display URL you pleased – it did not have to match up to your domain.  Those days are long gone.)

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Rob Boyd: The largest factor is the setup. This would include creating a goal and developing/organizing your testing variables. If you don’t have a goal for testing how will you know what is successful? If you don’t develop and organize your testing variables properly, how will you know what action impacted the results? This is the easy stuff so you should be getting it right. We only have a certain degree of control in the outcome of a test so if your foundation isn’t proper you aren’t giving yourself an opportunity to succeed. The second largest factor in my opinion is the ad copy, be it title, body, or display URL. Plain and simple, you need effective ad copy for a successful ad.

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Greg Meyers: I think many advertisers put too much attention on the Text Ad, when they should first be reviewing the relevancy of the Search Terms that are driving the Text Ad. That is why I believe that the Adgroup and the search terms chosen for the Test have the biggest influence on success. Once that has been achieved, then testing different CTAs, Offers, Prices, becomes effective.

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Bonnie Schwartz: Headline is very important.  I see the biggest impact through refining my ad groups and getting my kw in the headline.  Oftentimes, it may have less to do with the messaging in your ad but whether or not you have the keyword in bold in your ad a few times.

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John Lee: For search ads, the biggest factors are the actual offer, the benefits touted in the ad and the call-to-action. Swapping these factors in and out can provide interesting, and hopefully positive results. For display ads it is more about how well are you distracting the user away from the website they are viewing. How crazy-distracting can you make your text ad without abandoning PPC ad writing fundamentals or crossing the line in terms of good taste?

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Jon Rognerud: Uppercase/lowercase, periods, different characters, numbers and call to action statements.

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Learn More About The Authors

• Brad Geddes – Certified Knowledge
• Andrew Goodman – PageZero
• Jessica Niver – Hanapin Marketing
• Chad Summerhill – PPC Prospector
• Amy Hoffman – Hanapin Marketing
• Erin Sellnow – Hanapin Marketing
• Pete Hall – Room 214, a social media agency
• Ryan Healy – BoostCTR / RyanHealy.com
• Jeff Sexton – BoostCTR / JeffSextonWrites.com
• Tom Demers – BoostCTR / MeasuredSEM
• Bradd Libby – The Search Agents
• Crosby Grant – Stone Temple Consulting
• Rob Boyd – Hanapin Marketing
• Greg Meyers – SEMGeek / iGesso
• Bonnie Schwartz – SEER Interactive
• John Lee – Clix Marketing
• Jon Rognerud – JonRognerud.com
• Joe Kerschbaum – Clix Marketing

This week, we’re celebrating the release of Text Ad Zoom with a 5 part Q&A series featuring the authors who wrote the articles highlighted in The Ultimate List of PPC Ad Testing Resources. Each day this week, we’ll have a different question and the answers.

Yesterday, we asked “What are the biggest text ad testing mistakes?“. Read below for today’s question and answers (in no particular order).

Want to see Text Ad Zoom and all of the other great ClickEquations features in action? Request a demo or email sales@clickequations.com.

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Text Ad Optimization Q&A #2: How Do You Pick Which Ads To Test First?

Brad Geddes: I like to start with completely different ads at first. One might have a price, another DKI, another a strong call to action, and another one based around benefits, etc. Then once I find what type of ad works well for that keyword or buying cycle component, then I’ll move to testing more incremental changes based upon the winning ads.

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Andrew Goodman: Every ad group should start with an attempt to nail the correct fit and tone for the imagined prospect, and it should be rotated with 2-3 additional (alternate theory) ads to send you signals as to whether your approach is working. What’s first as far as your “attempt to nail it”? I like to use something I call a “plain ad”. Write the most concise, clear headline possible and convey cues about positioning (quality, speed, shipping, etc.) in the body copy. Consider adding your company’s USP’s if you’ve already brainstormed them

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Jessica Niver: If I run into time constraints (can you imagine?), I focus my energy on: high CPL-high conversion ad groups, high conversion, high-competition ad groups regardless of CPL. For ecommerce clients, any ad groups with multiple sale offers that change frequently or that can be tested against one another. I’d also keep a list of ad groups that have a high seasonal/holiday bias and make sure those are focused on at the right time of year/month as well. Also low-CTR, low-quality score ad groups though those often need work on keyword-ad relevancy more than just ad text testing. Because it’s testing, the ads you add won’t always improve performance immediately. Maybe they suck and you shouldn’t use that messaging and that’s what the test shows you. So in spite of the above I try not to test in all of my high-lead or high-revenue ad groups simultaneously to maintain a performance safety zone so I don’t completely damage my clients’ shorter-term performance if something goes unexpectedly.

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Chad Summerhill: I start with the high-volume ad groups first. Any ad groups that are performing well below the campaign’s average performance (CTR, CR, PPI).

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Amy Hoffman: I generally select ads that I think will perform the best.  Knowing the account helps in selecting ads to test and I generally have a good idea about which ads will work best.  I take into account the number of keywords in the ads, the search volume of the keywords in the ads, the quality score of the keywords in the ad, and the relevance of the ad to the landing page.

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Erin Sellnow: For regular testing, I tend to focus on my underperforming ad groups first. Ones with a low CTR or quality score, as I need to improve their performance in order to better the entire account. If I am looking to do some general experimenting though, I will look at my high traffic ad groups first, so I can get baseline results quickly. From there I can tweak the test with other ad groups, but at least I know if the general idea if going to work or not without waiting for months to get results.

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Pete Hall: Usually I’ll start with a tried and true CTA that the client uses for other marketing efforts and then build off that. Zappos is known for their great customer service. Others pride themselves on free shipping. Ease of use. Affordable, and so on. That’s a great way to start. If there’s some big-time awards or accolades that the client has received, i.e. “Product of the year”, that’s a great starting point as well.

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Ryan Healy: The easiest way to decide is to simply pick the ad you think is most persuasive and test it first. Then test the next most persuasive ad, and so forth.

If you have three ads you want to test, there is no scientific process that will tell you in advance which ad will perform best. So you just have to trust your gut and start testing.

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Jeff Sexton: Well, there are multiple schools of thought on this.  Obviously if the rest of your account management is messed up, you may want to fix that first, or to test those ads which have the relatively soundest ad groups and bid management, as you don’t want to watch your hard work become invalidated after a major account reorganization.

Similarly, you’d also want to start where the landing pages have been optimized or have proven to be good performers.  Although your PPC testing can give you insights that will help you with your landing page (and vice verse), it always helps to test PPC Ads for a landing page that’s already converting well.

But assuming that your ad groups, Ad Words management, and landing pages are all up to snuff, you’d probably want to focus on those Ads that are responsible for the bulk of your profit.  Start where improvements will make the maximum difference.

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Tom Demers:

• Cost – Which groups are spending the largest amount? These are the areas where testing and even small percentage growth in areas like conversion and click-through rate on your ads can have a large impact.
• Opportunity for Improvement – Larger groups that have indicators of problem ads like low CTRs, low Quality Scores across the board, or low conversion rates can be good candidates for optimization. Another good thing to look at here are “internal benchmarks” or peer calculations.
• Time between test – Another thing we’ve found has been a great indication that ad copy can be working harder is when it’s been months (or years) between tests. There are really an infinite number of variations and approaches you can take to testing an ad, so a stale ad almost always offers a great opportunity to find a variation that will resonate better with prospects.

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Crosby Grant: I have a two part answer: 1) where to start, and 2) what to start with.

1.) Where to start:  I try to always start testing in the AdGroup most likely to yield the biggest improvement in the goals I am trying to meet.  Then I move on to the next when the expected return on time spent on the current one is less than the expected return on time spent in the next one.  Most often, that is the Ad Group with the most traffic because even small changes there will produce relatively large results in your metrics.  It might also be the Ad Group with the least-optimized ads, because it should be easy to get big improvements there.

2.) What to start with: That sort of depends.  Early in an optimization cycle I try to start with the most diverse set of ads I can, because I don’t know yet which ones will lead to the gains I am looking for.  In a more mature testing routine, we are probably down to trying to refine subtleties and looking to squeeze that last bit of CTR or margin, or whatever we are seeking to maximize.

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Rob Boyd: My decision is going to be based on the principle of doing what will have the highest impact first. Generally the first place I’m going to look is in the highest spend campaign or ad group. This isn’t always the case however. For example, the high spend campaign might already be performing within desired goal metrics, which might sway my decision to look at a campaign that is outside of goal metrics but one that I feel has great potential. The argument could be made that improving the campaign that is already within goal metrics could have a greater impact, based on the spend level alone, but attacking the lower performing campaigns or ad groups one-by-one could collectively add up to a greater impact and a more well rounded account.

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Greg Meyers: First of all, the Text Ad Test should not be a “one and done” thing. It requires multiple levels of testing. Depending on the situation, I would suggest taking an existing Text Ad that already has conversions and decent CTR% in it’s history and use that as a starting point. The reason, is that I want to make sure that there is potential for success “after the click” as CTR% should not always be the deciding factor.

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Bonnie Schwartz: When I start off I like to test two completely different description lines and keep the headline constant. This somewhat contradicts statement A above, but I find sometimes that by just changing little things off the bat, it makes it hard to achieve real finding.  As such, I go for very different messaging in the first test to find a strong ad overall.  Once I get messaging that works I tweak from there and change one variable at a time.

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John Lee: The ads that are generating the best combination of CVR, CTR and ROI are the ones that I test first. These text ads are frequently the highest volume ads, too, which speeds up testing.

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Jon Rognerud: Start with the end in mind. Ask this: what is the goal or objective you are trying to reach? Then speak to that, write that. And, the word “consistency” comes to mind. You should test ads (first) that match up the closest to your landing page content, message and offer. Write different versions that speak to the same page and test those first.

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Joe Kerschbaum: Test the ideas that you think will win. Then continue on that path. Test with bold ideas. Swing for the fences.

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Learn More About The Authors

• Brad Geddes – Certified Knowledge
• Andrew Goodman – PageZero
• Jessica Niver – Hanapin Marketing
• Chad Summerhill – PPC Prospector
• Amy Hoffman – Hanapin Marketing
• Erin Sellnow – Hanapin Marketing
• Pete Hall – Room 214, a social media agency
• Ryan Healy – BoostCTR / RyanHealy.com
• Jeff Sexton – BoostCTR / JeffSextonWrites.com
• Tom Demers – BoostCTR / MeasuredSEM
• Bradd Libby – The Search Agents
• Crosby Grant – Stone Temple Consulting
• Rob Boyd – Hanapin Marketing
• Greg Meyers – SEMGeek / iGesso
• Bonnie Schwartz – SEER Interactive
• John Lee – Clix Marketing
• Jon Rognerud – JonRognerud.com
• Joe Kerschbaum – Clix Marketing

We’re celebrating the release of Text Ad Zoom with an in-depth look at how you can optimize your text ads. In case you missed it last week, check out The Ultimate List of PPC Ad Testing Resources. It’s a huge collection of articles, videos and presentations on testing and writing text ads.

This week, we’re doing a 5 part Q&A series with the authors who wrote the articles featured in the list. Each day this week, we’ll have a different question and the answers.

Opinions vary and sometimes the authors disagree. Proof again that no matter how much experience you have, the data will win the day. Not every author answered each question. Finally, the answers are unedited straight from the authors, so draw your own conclusions and remember to test any ideas you read.

Read below for today’s question and answers (in no particular order).

Want to see Text Ad Zoom and all of the other great ClickEquations features in action? Request a demo or email sales@clickequations.com.

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Text Ad Optimization Question #1: What are some of the biggest mistakes people make in text ad testing (aside from only measuring CTR changes)?

Brad Geddes: I don’t think enough people focus on Profit Per Impression. Just by choosing the lowest CPA or highest converting rate ad, does not mean you will bring in the most revenue for your account. Another mistake is not having enough data before making decisions. There are too many online calculators where you can input some very low numbers (like 15 impressions and 1 click for one ad and 10 clicks and 15 impressions for another one) and the tool will tell you that you have a winner. Although, the number one mistake is not doing it at all. Ad copy testing is so easy that everyone should always be running a few tests at any one time.

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Andrew Goodman: I often hear: “test only one variable at a time.” Statistically, this really makes no sense, and more than that, it’s impractical. From a statistical standpoint, if you go in and try to isolate which of two calls to action are “better,” for starters, you’re ignoring variable interactions (once anything else you want to test has to be changed, you’re now assuming the winner from the previous test would interact most favorably with the changed conditions) and you’re ignoring the opportunity costs of the other tests you could be running. People will interpret this “test little things one at a time” maxim so literally, they will take forever to optimize properly. What this approach fails to see is how blinkered it makes you. “Is ‘buy now’ or ‘buy today’ a better call to action?” Maybe they’re about the same, or maybe what you’ve just done is rule out a different style of ad that took more room talking about pricing or a third party endorsement, or some other trigger. There is absolutely nothing wrong with bolder testing of three or four very different style of ad, to see if any of these create a significantly better response. For some reason, that sounds unscientific to some people, but you don’t create marketing results by spending your time in the wrong chapters of the wrong statistics textbooks.

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Jessica Niver:

1. Assuming they know what types of messaging appeal to their audience and not testing very different approaches against each other.

2. Completely ignoring CTR changes- though ultimately for a revenue or lead-based client you want the highest-conversion-rate ads, high CTR ads with lower conversion rates are informative. High CTR with lower conversion rate=people liked something about your ad but didn’t see a follow-through on your landing page, so it’s an opportunity to modify your landing page to match expectations and turn your high-CTR low-conversion ads into high-CTR high-conversion ads.

3. Completely disconnecting ad text testing and landing page testing (see above). One is the promise the other is supposed to deliver on, so even though it makes testing more complicated you can’t treat them as separate entities.

4. Running too many ads against one another for your traffic numbers. This just slows down testing and drags out poorly-performing tests. Let’s just figure out what works and move on to the next test, not watch something suck for two months until we’re 100% sure.

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Chad Summerhill: Not considering the cost of testing – You are just as likely (if not more likely) to lose than to win a test, so you want to eliminate losers quickly. Focusing on conversion rate only – If possible you should focus on conversion-per-impression or profit-per-impression.  The goal should be to maximize total conversions/profit.

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Amy Hoffman: People seem to tend to  get a little pause-happy, meaning, they tend to try to pick a winner before the test is statistically significant.  There are a few free tools online for determining statistical validity, which should be used to aid in the decision making process.

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Erin Sellnow: The two biggest mistakes I often see are people testing too many things at once (so it is difficult to isolate what really worked) or they don’t let ads accumulate enough data, and pause too quickly. While it is tough to wait it out, patience is important so you know you are making the correct decision.

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Pete Hall: I’d say people too often think that their new ads will crush the current iterations, so being overconfident with your ads and not properly A/B testing can an issue if you’re not careful. I’ve had numerous instances where I thought I’d written the perfect ad, built on successful elements of past ads, implemented it, and it tanked. So making sure to properly test your new ads against existing ads, even if you think it’s perfect is critical.

One other mistake is not setting ad delivery to rotate in an A/B test. AdWords likes to favor ads and this will skew your results, so ensuring delivery is set to rotate is key.

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Ryan Healy: Here are three common mistakes I see:

1. Writing an ad that gets a lot of clicks, but is not consistent with the messaging on the landing page. (This disconnect can hurt conversions and profitability.)

2. Writing a winning ad, then letting it run for months (or years) without ever writing a new ad to challenge it.

3. Writing two or three ads for an Ad Group, then letting them run for months (or years) without ever deleting the losing ads.

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Jeff Sexton: Well, perhaps the biggest mistake is NOT optimizing ad text – or doing some testing and then adopting a “set it and forget it” mindset.

But, assuming that people are actively testing their ad text, the next biggest mistakes is not thinking past the keywords to get at the searcher intention BEHIND those keywords.  Behind every set of keywords are people who are searching on those keywords in response to a need, problem, or question.  Optimizing ad text means writing ads that better speak to those people on the other end of the screen.

So you should be looking at actual searcher queries associated with those keywords, past test results, competitive ads and landing pages, etc. in order to actively seek out an understanding of searcher mindset.  Once you have that hypothesis you’ll be able to write ads on a more coherent basis and also able to interpret test results on a more scientific basis.  In other words, the proving or disproving of a hypothesis will give you a direction on “what to try next” after each test, whether winning or losing.  This will also allow you to more intelligently apply other ad writing best practices.

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Tom Demers:

1. Looking at the wrong sample size and/or deciding based on ”bad data” – Even though there are a lot of tools to help you identify whether you’ve reached statistical significance, people often ignore them and either end tests too soon or run them too long. Another variation on this theme is looking at “bad data” to draw conclusions about a test – basically you want to carefully catalog changes within your account so that you’re not lumping in data where a text ad is married to a different landing page or set of keywords. Those things can have a huge impact on ad performance, and may lead you to pick the wrong winner.

2. Not testing enough – This is far and away the biggest mistake we see, particularly in larger campaigns. Across our network we see around a 30% lift in sales from continual optimizations made by our writers. This means for higher volume ad groups where you’re neglecting to test and iterate on ad copy, you’re leaving a lot on the table.

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Bradd Libby: ‘Only measuring CTR’ is a big one by itself. There’s at least one company, BoostCTR.com, named after doing this process wrong.

Here are some other mistakes:

1. Treating ad testing like it might be a quick cure for current performance problems. That is, waiting until some problematic performance is seen and then trying to use ad testing to improve results by the end of the month. Ad testing should be done continuously as a normal part of account management.

2. Not qualifying traffic prior to testing. It doesn’t do much good to test two ad creatives against each other on month, pick the winner, and then the next month add a bunch of negative keywords to the adgroup.

3. Misinterpreting the meaning of statistical significance. Confidence levels only state how likely results were to not have been obtained by chance.

4. Not repeating tests. Reproducibility is one of the hallmarks of good science. If ad ‘B’ wins in an A/B test, you should be able to repeat the test in 3 months and see ‘B’ beat ‘A’ again.

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Crosby Grant: And aside from not doing it at all!  Judgment errors in choosing the winner ad is a mistake that can be pretty costly and that happens often.  Using rigorous statistics is one part of the solution, but often requires more traffic, and thus time, than is reasonable or available.  A good example is with holiday ads.  You only get about a week each year to test each holiday ad version, which might not provide enough traffic.  To a lesser extent a similar dynamic happens with ads running year-round if you are imposing an artificial time horizon for your test cycles.  For example, if you want to complete a test every week, or every month.  Then of course there is the question of which metric(s) to optimize for.  Books could be written on that one.  My preference is for maximizing margin ((advertising revenue – advertising cost)/advertising revenue) because it takes all of the other metrics into account, and because at the end of the day, more money in your pocket is, well, more money in your pocket.  Of course, many advertisers don’t use rigorous statistics at all, and simply rely on judgment based on the metrics, whichever metric they choose.  I call that “business statistics.”  Statistics is not the whole solution though.  It is quite possible to have two identical ads with statistically significant variances in performance.  This is mostly due to the X-Factor of AdWords’ system assigning Quality Score based on limited data – which is another topic altogether.  So, another part of the solution is considering the content of the ads.  This is where human judgment comes in, and where experience really helps.  Choosing a test, and choosing a winner, then interpreting that to help you craft more ads that are also winners, is part of the art.  It works together with the science provided by the statistics.  Getting this part wrong is a potentially costly mistake that happens often, and that’s why it makes my list of one of the biggest mistakes people make in text ad testing.

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Rob Boyd: I feel the largest mistake is not creating ads with a purpose. When you get down to it, you can have all of your metrics and variables planned out perfectly but in the end it all comes down to the ad text. Is what your writing more effective at reaching your target audience then your existing ad? Is your ad focused on intent? As marketers, we don’t always write winners but I think the largest mistake is to throw darts blindfolded. If you aren’t truly getting into the mind of your audience you are stacking the deck against yourself. Plus, when you do write a winner, it’s all the more satisfying. In my opinion, the second largest mistake in ad testing is not keeping your account pace in mind. What I mean by that is, you have to test in relation to the spend or click level of the account. If each ad group is only generating a handful of clicks a day and you are testing 5 ads, it could take months over months to gather statistically relevant data. Testing in relation to your data gathering ability is important because it will allow you to make actionable decisions more frequently, which should result in more consistent incremental improvements over time.

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Greg Meyers: Many Advertisers tend to test too many elements all at once, so there is no clear understanding of what was the deciding factor in identifying a winner vs. loser. Another key mistake that happens is figuring what elements make up the test. Typically, the 1^st level test should be either a specific CTA (Call to Action) or to a different Audience. The idea of testing a single word would be a waste of time and would not “move the needle” Other common mistakes would be insufficient length of testing time which could lead to misinterpretation of results.

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Bonnie Schwartz:

A. Testing too many variables at once, which makes it difficult to pin down what actually led to the winning ad.

B. Testing too many ad copy variations at once, which makes getting enough data to make statistically significant data difficult

C. Going along with B, not basing decisions off of statistical significance

D. Not Testing at All!

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John Lee: Advertisers make a wide variety of mistakes when testing text ads. The biggest, and most obvious, is simply NOT testing at all. But more specifically, advertisers frequently test too many ads at once. This can slow down testing, complicate determining results, etc. Test a smaller number of ads, 2-3 is best, with concrete testing variables in each.

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Jon Rognerud: Firstly, testing with too little data. In other words, they make a decision to pause or delete an ad before understanding or knowing that it actually works. Secondly, just copying what others are doing – assuming that it will work for them.

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Joe Kerschbaum: Testing too many variations at once. Testing variations that are too similar; I’ve seen too many tests where the ads are basically the same except for perhaps a punctuation mark. Test big ideas and see what works.

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Learn More About The Authors

• Brad Geddes – Certified Knowledge
• Andrew Goodman – PageZero
• Jessica Niver – Hanapin Marketing
• Chad Summerhill – PPC Prospector
• Amy Hoffman – Hanapin Marketing
• Erin Sellnow – Hanapin Marketing
• Pete Hall – Room 214, a social media agency
• Ryan Healy – BoostCTR / RyanHealy.com
• Jeff Sexton – BoostCTR / JeffSextonWrites.com
• Tom Demers – BoostCTR / MeasuredSEM
• Bradd Libby – The Search Agents
• Crosby Grant – Stone Temple Consulting
• Rob Boyd – Hanapin Marketing
• Greg Meyers – SEMGeek / iGesso
• Bonnie Schwartz – SEER Interactive
• John Lee – Clix Marketing
• John Rognerud – JonRognerud.com
• Joe Kerschbaum – Clix Marketing

Steve Baker at epiphany put up a very interesting post this week, in which he analyzed some quality score data to try and answer three questions:

1. How high is a high click through rate?
2. What is a decent click through rate for a given position?
3. How do you know if your Quality Score is being dragged down by the Account Quality Score or your adverts?

These are things we’d all like to know, and his results are interesting, but I have some concerns about whether or not they really answer any of these questions in any way we can rely on. To be clear, I’m not sure – so I’m posting my thoughts here to hopefully further the discussion.

If you haven’t please go read his entire post.

There three thing that concern me about the methodology and the conclusions:

1. A mistake concerning the idea that ‘quality score is only calculated on Exact Match’.
2. The assumption that ‘visible quality score’ is quality score.
3. The treatment of the relationship between quality score and bids and position.

Quality Score and Match Type

As discussed at length last week, visible quality score only takes into account the performance of past impressions where search query was identical to keyword, regardless of match type. Using a data set comprised only of Exact Match keywords is certainly a study of its own, but may very well not be representative of how all keywords of all match types perform or behave. Since AdWords already disregards non-identical queries, given the other assumptions this analysis would be equally accurate with all match types included.

Analyzing Visible Quality Score

It’s very hard not to conflate quality score and visible quality score, as Google themselves use the one name ‘quality score’ to refer to both – but they’re very different and I think as search managers we need to begin to really understand that these two things are very different and using them interchangably will lead us to a lot of very inaccurate conclusions. I wrote about the differences in a guest post last week on PPC Hero.

The complexity is that if you’re only analyzing queries which are identical to keywords, as visible quality score does, when in fact all non-identical queries are earning potentially very distinct quality scores for those same keywords, then there is no way to know how valid any conclusions really are. In effect, it’s taking a non-random sampling of the available data (only the identical queries, which represents an unknown % of the data) and ignoring the rest. We might assume that the identical queries have higher CTRs and therefore represent the best quality scores of the bunch – but it is literally impossible to know.

Of course, visible quality score is all we’ve got. Therefore it’s entirely natural to analyze this data and try to understand it and learn from it and draw conclusions. I’m not arguing against it. But I am suggesting that the characteristics of that data have to be acknowledged and considered along with any conclusions.

Quality Score, Bid, and Position

We all know that bid x quality score = ad rank, which determines the position in which any ad appears. In this case, quality score is not visible quality score but a version I’ve taken to calling ‘quality score for ad rank’ that includes a number of factors ignored in visible quality score.

In his post, Steve supplies some very nice charts showing the relationship between position and quality score from his data set. He’s found keywords with visible quality scores of 10 that live in nearly every position from 1 down to 8, for example. Actually his post includes similar charts from many different quality scores.

Chart from Steve Baker @ epiphany

Steve’s draws several conclusions from this data:

• “It appears that Google expect the click through rate in any position to be about 65% of the next position up. So where position 1.0 has an average click through rate of 34%, position 2 has an average click through rate of 22.1%”
• “This appears to be Google’s estimate of what ‘should’ happen to your click through rate every time you drop a position – you lose just over 1/3 of your clicks.”
• “Using this, you can potentially ‘health check’ your account. If you have a click through rate of 4.5% in position 4, you should have a Quality Score of around 7 or so. If you are getting less than the predicted Quality Score across the bulk of your keywords (excluding brand, on Google only, on Exact Match), then it’s a sign that your account has other issues, possibly with the landing page, keyword relevance or the overall account quality.”

Ignoring for a moment the issues about match type and visible quality score, I just can’t quite see how these conclusions are valid. My concern is that the impact of bid on determining the position a keyword earns isn’t considered or reflected – it isn’t just quality score that is driving these positions.

I’ve only had a few moments over the past 24 hours to really think about this, but I’d love to hear from the many smart readers we’ve got what they think of this analysis.

It would be great to have ANY answers to the original questions, and Steve has done a great job of collecting data and presenting it to us with some interesting potential conclusions. I hope he doesn’t mind if we try to crowdsource some additional work on his data.

UPDATE: I realize re-reading this that I didn’t comment directly on the three questions Steve set out to answer. They’re great questions, and there is a lot we know about the answers outside of the data being discussed here. I’ll take these up in a future post.

Quality Score in High Resolution

New 225-pg paperback
by Craig Danuloff

Learn more and order your copy today.