AB Split Testing Google.

Google Adwords is one of the fastest ways of getting targeted –and usually ‘ready to buy’ — customers or clients on to a web site.

Search for any phrase on Google, and in a coloured box at the top of the page, and on the right hand side a plain White column of ‘Sponsored Links’ will appear. Those are Google Adwords text advertisements.

So, let’s say you sell all kinds of ‘Dimpled Widgets’, and want your advert to appear on Google when anyone searches for the phrase ‘dimpled widgets’.

Simply add that phrase to your Google account, set how much you want to pay each time someone clicks your advert (the “CPC” or “Cost Per Click”), and let it run.

Within 15 minutes of starting a new campaign I’ve seen streams of visitors arriving on sites and buying. It really is one of the most dynamic and powerful advertising systems ever invented.

Unfortunately, with that power comes complexity, and this is where many advertisers fail and give up with Adwords. They don’t understand some critical factors that make it profitable. This article covers one of them. If you have any intention of using Adwords, make sure you follow this carefully.

First of all, WHERE your adverts appear on Google is critical.

Ideally you want your adverts to be showing between positions 3 to 7. And definitely on the first page.

However, so do your competitors!

So they may decide to ‘outbid’ you.

If they agree to pay Google more per click than your adverts, it stands to reason Google will show their advert higher up the page, and push yours further down the page.

However, there’s a simple tactic you can employ and get leverage on — one that most Google Advertisors don’t make anywhere near enough use of — to your great competitive advantage if you’re smart enough to use it!

With this tactic you can pay less per click than your competitors yet still have your adverts showing above theirs.

Here’s a simple example.

Let’s say you’ve told Google you will pay up to 50 pence per click for the phrase “Dimpled Widget”.

And let’s say your competitor is paying up to 60 pence per click for the “Dimpled Widget” phrase.

To start with, your advert will likely show below your competitors, because after all, they’ll pay Google more for each click, so Google will initially favour their advert.

However, if the wording of your advert is more compelling and persuasive than your competitors, and your advert gets clicked twice in a day where your competitors advert only gets clicked once, you pay Google £1.00, and your competitor only pays Google 60 pence.

All of a sudden, even though you’re bidding less per click, your advert jumps above your competitor and pushes their advert down the page. (Actually there’s a bit more to it — especially something called the Quality Score — but this is the essence of how the system works).

So the number one question is, how do you optimise your text advert. How do you make them more persuasive and compelling, so they and get clicked more?

SPLIT TESTING.

In a nutshell, Google allows you to write more than one advert. You can use different headlines, words and punctuation. Even show a different web address.

Then Google rotates through each of the adverts every time your phrase (in this example “Dimpled Widgets”) is searched.

Over time, you will find that one of those adverts out-performs all of the others. And that is the one which may start beating your competitors adverts. (If they’re not split testing it won’t take you long to beat them… where you’re paying a much lower cost per click and yet displaying adverts above them.)

At this point I’m frequently asked how many adverts you should have in rotation at any one time. That’s really dependent on the volume of searches for your chosen phrases.

For example if only a small number of people search for ‘Dimpled Widgets’ each day then you would only have two adverts in rotation. Otherwise if you had a lot in rotation it would take too long to find a winnner.

However if your chosen keywords are heavily searched phrases, that hundreds or thousands of people search for on Google each day, you may have up to 5 adverts or more in rotation at any one time… because you’ll still find out which is a winner in a short space.

WHAT DO DO WHEN YOU FIND A WINNING ADVERT.

1) Make a note of the losing adverts (you don’t want to reintroduce those in the future so don’t forget what you already tested)

2) Pause or delete the losers

3) Take the winning advert that has the highest CTR (Click Through Rate) and then make new adverts based on that one — but change one of more of the lines. So in essence you’re now testing variations of the winnining advert. This fine tuning is where you really start making a difference.

4) Add the winning advert to your web page (integrate the wording). That way when people click from Google and arrive on your site, the ‘offer’ made in the advert is repeated on the web page. This consistency usually results in better post-Google-click activity.

As you can imagine, the real trick is being able to write great advert in the first place.

Tomorrow I’ll explain how to write persuasive adverts, reveal how punctuation makes all the difference, and give you a link to special “Copywriting Cheat” software I use that contains a database of tens of thousands of winning adverts and can actually predict if a new advert will win or lose even before it goes on Google.

See you tomorrow.

-Ed.

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