Adwords Split Testing

There are two main factors that can influence the price you pay for a click being…

CTR (click through rate ie the percentage of people that see your advert that click on it, eg if 100 people are shown your advert and 3 people click on it, you have a CTR of 3%)

Quality score (Google’s score of how relevant it thinks your keywords, advert and site are, for example if your advert is about dog collars but the page is about cat food Google will not like this in fear of a bad user experience – therefore it is important to ensure landing pages are a) on topic to the keyword group and b) the html / content can easily be read and understood by Google and such content backups up the theme of the keywords being used).

Wouldn’t it be great if you could experiment to find what the best variables above would be, for example does keyword X showing advert Y to landing page X give the best results ? well, thanks to Google we can, using split testing.

Split testing is simply creating two adverts for each adgroup where 50% of the traffic will be shown advert A and 50% advert B. Once we have enough data to trust the reactions of the humans seeing the adverts we then play “beat the leader”, for example let's say…

Advert A has a CTR of 2%
Advert B has a CTR of 5%

… we would then remove advert A and write another advert to try and beat the CTR of advert B, which is a continual process to always try to find the higher CTR. So why is CTR so important ? because it plays a major role (in addition to other factors) on how much you pay for a click, a simplistic example is…

CTR * your max bid = your bidding “power”

… for example, let's say we were both in competition for the keyword “dog toys” and we both set our max bid to £1.00 per click, if my CTR was 1% and yours was 5%, the calculation would be…

Me = 1 * £ 1.00= £1.00
You = 5 * £1.00 = £5.00

… so we’re both paying £1.00, but you have the buying power of £5.00 which means you would be much higher than me for the same price, or we could reduce your costs eg maybe to £0.21 and you would still beat me.

Split testing has allowed me to go into niches dominated by major companies spending incredible amounts per bid, but were lazy in their set up and management / optimisation of the PPC and split testing has allowed me to compete ad win at a fraction of the budget the big companies spend.

Split testing and my algo bidding system are my two big “weapons” of choice in maximizing Google Adwords PPC performance.