Ashleigh Betvardeh
Let’s face it: AdWords campaigns that have matured are an issue for advertisers. There’s only one way to improve a matured AdWords account, and that’s through A/B or split testing.
As marketers, we can recall The Product Life Cycle (PLC) theory where there are four major stages of a product: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. This principle can absolutely be applied to AdWords campaigns. And no one wants to see their campaign in the “decline” stage.
How do you identify a mature account? It’s simple: there’s been no change that can impact conversions!
How do you impact conversions?
This post will talk about not one, but three ways. They’ll all expand on how we can apply the A/B testing theory to different parts of your PPC campaign.
Landing Pages
If you have set landing pages, make copies of them and conduct an A/B split test on one page factor. From my experience, I recommend setting the split test from the landing page side rather than the AdWords campaign.
There are numerous A/B testing tools you can use for your landing pages, like Visual Website Optimizer. No matter what tool you’re using, set the traffic split to 50/50; this is the fastest way to get a good sample size for statistically significant results.
It’s super important to note that there will be times during this process your cost-per-converted-click may increase. But don’t worry, and realize it’s a risk that you’ll work the kinks out of later in the optimization process.
In saying this, how do you evaluate the challenger-landing page? There are two main metrics we can use: the cost-per-converted click (where the aim is to reduce as much as possible), along with click-conversion-rate (the goal is to get this as high as possible). With that in mind, get to testing!
Promotions and Offers
I love market research. Usually, I compile a list of my client’s competitors and see what their unique propositions are, along with their offers throughout the year. I guess this is what it means to keep your friends close and your enemies closer?
This would help me brainstorm and propose different offers to try throughout the year. I’ve heard many small businesses say, “Why are you comparing me to them? They’re bigger”. Size isn’t the issue. Bigger companies invest in testing, and we smaller guys can learn from their results.
It’s not about your size but your resources, and in many cases the “smaller” businesses have the knowledge, but not the resources to devote to testing new ideas.
Advert A/B Testing
Have you ever introduced a new advert in the mix and suddenly received a lot more conversions in a few days, weeks, or even months? If the answer’s no, then you’re not testing your ads enough!
If you have a look at your conversion report, you can see how many impressions it takes before someone converts. And I’m betting you that in most cases, it takes more than once. This means you need to test between different ads.
You can write your adverts to different target markets, or concentrate on reducing risks. I remember one of my university lecturers once said, “it’s a marketer’s job to reduce risks; this way we are answering their questions without them knowing.” There are 6 risks identified that can be used to shape your adverts: functional, financial, temporal, psychological, social and sensory.
Final Remarks
As you can see, the catalyst of this article has been the A/B split test. The best part of working in this industry is testing – so get into it! Hopefully this article has inspired you to think a little more broadly about why your AdWords account matured in the first place, along with ideas that can be applied to other PPC mediums, such as Bing and Facebook.
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