ClickEquations Blog

Text ads are trying to answer questions.

Writing text ads is difficult because you have only 95 characters to stand out from a sea of competing messages and persuade the searcher that you’re the ad to click.

There are many strategies and tactics to accomplish this, and both technical skill and creativity are required. The process takes considerable time and effort.

And there is only one way to measure success. Testing.

But testing requires more than simply running a couple of ads simultaneously. It requires the conditions for a fair test, a clear goal, and valid measurement and analysis. Much of what passes for text-ad testing in paid search lacks one or more of these requirements.

Let’s look a little closer at each to better understand how to properly test text ads.

Conditions For Text Ad Testing

Text ads cannot be effectively tested too early in the process of optimizing your account or ad groups.

If you haven’t yet optimized the keywords, match types, ad group organization, and negatives then the search queries coming into the ad group will be too diverse. If people are asking 25 different questions it’s impossible to compose any single answer that will satisfy all of them. If you try to test text ads too early, you won’t be able to trust the results. Maybe you’ve got a lousy text ad, or maybe the ad is just running against a lot of very untargeted or unqualified search queries.

So before even beginning to worry about text ad testing, make sure you’ve read and implemented Secret Truths #1 – #8. When the vast majority of the queries coming into an ad group are similar, you’re read to test text ads.

Of course, you have to write some text ads when you setup an ad group. And you should monitor and review their performance and make changes as necessary. But hard core text-ad testing – statistical comparisons – isn’t reasonable or necessary until the ad group has been properly constructed and intelligently optimized and – in terms of search queries – stabilized.

What You Can and Can’t Control

Another factor to consider in text-ad testing is the reality that paid search is a dynamic environment. Keywords get added, negatives expanded, bids change, competitors impact average positions, and other account modifications take place on a regular basis. There are variations in activity and results based on day of the week, week of the month, month of the year, weather, news events, sales, inventory, competitor promotions, and more.

So in the time it takes your ad group to get a sufficient number of impressions or clicks for a good test, how can you be sure that it is the ad copy that you’re really testing?

The answer is that you really can’t. There are no static environments in PPC. But all the ads in the test are subject to almost all the same environmental conditions, so many would argue these external influences don’t influence relative performance. That may be true, it may not. But you can’t control for many of these variables, so we ultimately have to accept them as a fact of life, a limitation in the system.

Whenever possible however, try to limit those changes you do control during deliberate text-ad tests. Don’t introduce new keywords or negatives or dramatically shift bids. Chance are if you find the need to make radical changes of any of these types you’d be better off making them and then restarting your tests.

Clear Text Ad Testing Goals

The goal of text ad testing is to determine which ad copy delivers the best click-through and/or conversion rates.

• Most ad testing focuses on CTR. That’s clearly the direct goal of the ad, and helps to drive up quality score.
• Conversion rate should be tracked and considered, even if CTR is the primary goal. There are many ways to incite a click, but Google gets paid for clicks while you get paid for conversions.
• The conversion-per-1000-impressions metric (CP1K) is a great way to blend these two goals and find the truly optimal ad copy. (I hope to write more about CP1K in the near future).

Statistically Valid Text Ad Testing Analysis

Assuming you have a clear goal in mind and a stable testing environment, test data becomes the next hurdle. How many impressions and clicks does a set of text ads need for a valid test?

The answer to that relatively straightforward question has eluded most PPC managers for years. I assume this is due to the fact that most of us aren’t trained mathemeticians or statisticians. (I’m certainly not.) And most of the software we use to create and edit text ads does not provided the statistical support we really need.

So we’ve slithered forward based on the conventional wisdom that suggests tracking ‘at least 100 impressions or 10 clicks before there is enough data to declare a winner’. Unfortunately this really isn’t very accruate or useful advice.

Statistically, it turns out that those of us who’ve been reacting to text-ads with anything near 100 impressions or a dozen or so clicks have regularly made essentially random decisions. We’ve paused the better ad many times, letting the loser run. We’ve sabataged our own results. Repeatedly. Over long periods of time.

Consider the example shown at right: Three text ads running in an ad group. About 500 impressions each.

Is there enough data to make a wise decision?

It seems pretty clear. The first ad at 1.98% CTR appears to be our winner. But the statistics tell us that it isn’t that clearcut.

I looked at the statistical significance and confidence intervals for these ads. We can only be 80% confident that the CTR difference between the first and second ad are actually different. Same for the difference between the second and third ad.

80% confidence is not very high.

It’s not considered high enough to be sure something is true in most activities where statistical confidence is considered. For scientific activities a 95% rate is the desired standard.

To understand the potential error in accepting these numbers, look (below) at the range of possible CTRs for each of these ads that we can be sure of with a 95% confidence.

The first ad may actually be as low as 0.82% CTR, or could be as high as 3.14%. That’s a pretty wide range – we just don’t know yet, with a high level of confidence, what the CTR of this ad is going to be. You can see similarly wide ranges for the other two ads, and in comparison see there is plenty of overlap in the potential which means if we really let this test play out, we may get a very different result.

So how many impressions would it take to get 95% confident in the differences?

If we let these ads run until they had around 1000 impressions each they’d achieve a 90% confidence. It takes nearly 1500 impressions per ad to hit 95% confidence.

The actual number needed for any given set of ads depends a lot on the CTRs and their relative difference. But it’s a rare circumstance when anything like 100 impressions or 10 clicks is adequate.

You can check the numbers on your own ads using two great tools:

• Vertster.com offers a simple, free, online utility that lets you enter CTRs for two ads and check the confidence level.
• Teascalc is an Excel sheet that costs $49 but offers a both confidence and interval data.

Making The Grade

Everything we do to create and optimize paid search accounts is done in hopes of showing the right people the right ad at the right price.

Their reaction to our ads is feedback on how well we’ve done at targeting them and organizing our accounts as well as on how aligned our answers are to their questions.

Fortunately for us if we do things right – in setting goals, creating testable conditions, and accurately measuring and analyzing we can get this feedback in clear, powerful, and actionable form.

Text ad testing isn’t just another wise and important step in paid search management. It’s the crucial step that pays off all the others.

This blog post is part of a series extending and amplifying the ideas in our free ebook ’21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

What they’re saying: “Everything you know about AdWords is the basics Google wanted you to know. Just enough to get you hooked. But what if there was fundamental secrets that they neglected to share? Would you want to know them? Now you can! 21 Secrets Truths is what you must read, no, act on, before your competitors do.”

- Bryan Eisenberg Conversion Expert and New York Times Best-Selling Author ’.

Download Your Copy Today
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Keywords and bids are over-rated, while search queries and text ad copy is under-appreciated. We’ve talked about the first three already, and now it’s time to talk about text ads.

As described in the book, text ads don’t offer a lot of space and yet have a huge responsibility. They’re the answer to those questions, the reason for your organization, the driver behind your quality scores, and almost certainly the most under-allocated aspect of your paid search campaign in terms of time and resources.

In a perfect world, you’d spend perhaps 50% of your PPC management time working on ad copy. My guess is the industry average is way below 5%.

This is true because the complexities of keyword selection, campaign organization, match types, quality score, bidding, and just about everything else we’ve discussed thus far consumes too much of our time and energy. We’re simply out of resources (time and energy) when we get to the point where we should hunker down and be creative.

There’s also an amazing dearth of good tools for managing the process of creating and reporting on good text ads. There are dozens or hundreds of keyword tools. There are nearly that many bidding programs or algorithms. Where are the tools that genuinely help paid search managers write, analyze, and test creatives?

Talk about a crying need in the market.

The Job Text Ads Must Do

The central premise of High-Resolution PPC is that every search is a question, and our job as paid search managers is to get the right answers in front of the right questions and pay the right amount for the priviledge.

Delivering good answers is the key to success. Of course there are many ways to answer any question. To make the problem even harder, the answer needs to suggest that the unqualified move no farther forward (don’t click) while at the same time trying to persuade the qualified to drive ahead (please click).

….and do it with just 70 characters plus the headline.

…while positioned next to 6-8 other ads (and another dozen organic answers) all vying for the searchers attention.

What’s so hard about that?

The Many Messages Of A Text Ad

Ad copy can fight for clicks with humor or wit. They can focus on features or benefits. They can be direct or indirect. They can push prices or discounts. They can ask for the click or promise great benefits on the other side of the click. There are probably 50 or more different kinds of messages that could be fitted into those 70 characters.

More often than not, the right answer is to include two or three different messages. One seeking trust, one confirming benefit, and another suggesting a good deal – for example.But that’s the challenge. Deciding the strategy and the tactic and then executing.

It’s a very tough gig.

One simple way to reduce the complexity is to structure the writing process. Most ads are written ‘stream of consciousness’ while staring at a blank page form or page. The complex sets of needs listed above are synthesised in someone’s head, and a few lines come out.

That method can work, obviously, but it requires a very gifted writer. I think that’s a very rare gift.

Creating Ads with Copy Blocks

A more deliberate method is to consider each of the messaging options and write copy blocks to express each of them. So for example you would write 3 to 5 ways to talk about the benefits, 3 to 5 ways (or more) to talk about features, 3 to 5 ways to establish trust, 3 to 5 ways to promote pricing, 3 to 5 calls to action, and so on.

Now assemble ads by combining some of these elements. This ensures that your copy testing spans the range of contextual options. It forces you to consider each messages you want to use. It allows you to think about how your ad compare to those of your competitors. And it sets the stage to find those copywriting breakthroughs that deliver hugh CTR gains.

This is far from the only copywriting strategy. It is, however, one that can be used along-side of others. There are many great resources for text ad copyrighting advice, and I suggest you seek them out.

The core advice is simple:

• Increase the percentage of your time spend on text ads.
• Define a strategy for writing ad copy
• Learn and use tactics and techniques to find and develop the best ads – don’t just ‘sit down and write em.’

Give ad copywriting the respect and resources it deserves, and your PPC results will benefit.

What Do You Think?

This blog post is part of a series extending and amplifying the ideas in our free ebook ’21 Secret Truths of High-Resolution PPC’.

What they’re saying: “Everything you know about AdWords is the basics Google wanted you to know. Just enough to get you hooked. But what if there was fundamental secrets that they neglected to share? Would you want to know them? Now you can! 21 Secrets Truths is what you must read, no, act on, before your competitors do.”

- Bryan Eisenberg Conversion Expert and New York Times Best-Selling Author ’.

Download Your Copy Today
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Why do some AdWords ads appear on top of the organic listing and not in the right-hand column?

So Google can make more money, of course.

How do you get your ads to appear on ‘top’? There is no guaranteed path, but here are the relevant facts.

1. There will not be top slots available for all keywords. Google decides which searches will display any top-listed ads. They also decide if there are 1, 2, or 3 slots available.
2. There is a minimum bid to get positioned on top. Of course it’s a secret. If you’re already at #1 on the right and want to force your way to the top, raise your bid – it may or may not work, Google will almost certainly get more money in either case, but at least you’ll find out.
3. If your bid is above the minimum required to be on top, but your ad rank (bid x quality score) your ad may ‘jump over’ other advertisers who had a higher ad rank but a lower bid. This jump will put your ad on top, while your competitors stay on the right.

There are significantly higher click-through rates seen by ads that make it to the top, above even those ranked #1 on the right. I’ve heard estimates as high as 3x-4x.

Proving that the future will be ever-more interesting, Google has recently been testing AdWords text-ads with ‘site-links’. These are multiple hyper-links to different landing pages within the advertisers’ web site.

Click To Enlarge

Site-Links have existed in organic listings for popular and high ranking sites for some time. According to Google their appearance in AdWords is just ‘yet another test’:

As part of our ongoing commitment to help users find the information they’re looking for online, we are testing a feature in which links to various pages of an advertiser’s website may appear within the text ads on Google.com. Presenting multiple landing page options is intended to make specific website information such as gift registries, special deals, store locators and the like more easily accessible to users. It also offers brand marketers a new way to quickly engage potential customers. This feature is currently in a limited beta with a small number of advertisers.

It’s an interesting idea, which we could imagine helping some Broad Match keywords quite a bit. On the other hand, imagine having to test different link combinations within each ad, and trying to track the various conversion rates on each of the landing pages. Or maybe Google will automatically select the appropriate pages based on the search query of the user?

Tests like this often come and go and are never heard from again. It will be interesting to see what happens with this one.

Hat Tip to SEO-RoundTable and Darrin Ward who originally discovered this test.

Last week at SMX in San Jose I participated on a panel called Writing Killer PPC Ad Copy -- with Shane Snow and David Szetela, with Matt Van Wagner as our moderator.

Shane gave a great presentation on creative approaches to writing ad copy, and David shared his broad knowledge including a focus on how ads and ad copy needs to be different on the content network.

I focused on three aspects of success with text ads:

1. Organize campaigns so the ads are seen by the right people.
2. Develop recipes for your ad copy to help you test for different triggers.
3. Conduct formal tests to find dramatic CTR improvements.

Improvements in text ad performance -- meaning higher click-through-rates -are within reach of every paid search advertisers. With a simple approach and a little effort, you can drive up CTR by 2x-4x or more, which brings a lot of advantages:

• Higher Quality Score
• Lower Cost-Per-Click
• Better Impression Share
• Higher Positions

Hopefully this 10-minute presentation will provide some insights, and inspire you to spend some time improving your text ads: