Every Google Ads account needs to have ads, landing pages, audiences, keywords and other areas tested regularly. This is called split testing or A/B testing. This helps you to evaluate your campaigns with some slight changes to determine the performance of particular metrics.
Carrying out split testing within your account is a crucial element of Google Ads optimisation. Without split testing, you will be unable to determine the true performance unless it is compared to something else. Split testing is also a great way to improve your account by offering an alternative. Below are ways you can carry out split testing to improve performance.
Ad Copy Testing:
It is critical to have multiple variations of ad copy. The headline and description can make all of the difference between generating a conversion and someone never clicking on your ad. By having just one ad in an ad group or campaign, you will be unable to tell how well this performs as there is nothing to compare it against. Therefore, by adding multiple ads with ad types, such as expanded and responsive text ads, you can review the performance of each ad and pause those that underperform. By constantly testing, you’ll start to learn what content resonates the best with your audience.
Keyword Testing:
As an advertiser, you may think that you know what types of words and phrases users who are interested in your services/products would search for. However, this may not be the case. Additionally, you may want to use every relevant keyword you can think of but these may not work.
The only true way to see what terms will generate leads/sales is to test your chosen keywords and track the results. After gathering data, you can see which keywords work best for you and then focus your budget and attention to them.
Landing Page Testing:
It is best practice to create two different variations of a landing page where you will send the user after they click on your ad. If you dominate your landing page experience, you’ll be able to drive more conversions and decrease your bounce rate.
By testing your landing page you can identify the performance between the two and determine the exact things that make them different. Should you have a landing page that doesn’t include CTAs and one that does, you will clearly see what is causing the improvement.
It is often the tiniest changes that can make the biggest difference on landing pages and this is why it is so important to test them regularly. Over time, you will begin to see your conversion rates increase and bounce rates decrease and this will allow you to focus on your PPC campaigns to drive traffic to your high-quality website.
Display Audience & Ads Testing:
Just like other forms of testing, testing the audiences and images used within your ads can have a major impact on your performance. Are you targeting the correct people? Are your images appealing?
Testing the audience that you are targeting can be hugely beneficial. For example, by having one ad group targeting in-market audiences and another targeting custom intent audiences, you can determine a difference from the metrics that are collected. One make work better than the other and you can then make a judgement on which one you would choose to use permanently.
When creating display ads, the images that you use are what the user will see first before they even make the decision to click through to your website. Therefore, it is absolutely vital to ensure that these will capture their attention. Therefore, testing these will allow advertisers to make a judgement on which image and text work best with their target audience.
Campaign Testing:
Within Google Ads, you are able to run an experiment against your existing campaign. For this, you are able to split test webpages, keywords, ads and more. You are able to set the desired time frame and the length of time you would like the experiment to run for.
Taking advantage of experiments can open your eyes to potential areas that may not be working well for you. For example, if you were to set up a campaign and use a different landing page you can then review the difference between the pages and this will allow you to see which one works best.
With all of the above information, it is paramount that all testing is given time to generate data and results before a judgement is made. Pausing an ad, keyword, experiment etc. based on the data gathered in just a week or month can actually be detrimental to your campaigns. Therefore, making sure you have enough data to form an opinion is vital.
Taking advantage of split testing can generate huge benefits in multiple areas of your Google Ads campaigns. Want to learn more about split testing and how this can be done? Contact our team today!
