When I attended PPC Classroom LIVE last year I had a chance to see Kirt Christensen, the renowned Adwords expert talk, and I also had a rare opportunity to talk to him about how he does Adwords.
Frankly, I was blown away, and since I’ve implemented some significant shifts in my thinking and strategy as it applies to Adwords.
Here’s one BIG idea/strategy I was able to steal from Kirt :
Setup a system to continually split test ALL of your Google Adwords Ads.
The advantages of actually doing this are ENORMOUS. First off 99% of advertisers and affilaites do NOT do this. If you’re really serious you may split test your ads 5-10 times before you settle on a winner, but not continually.
Small changes to your Google ads, such as changing one word, adding a question mark, etc can potentially make a HUGE difference in your CTR. Overtime if you’re continually improving your CTR and your landing page quality score (I’ll get into that later), you’ll BLOW AWAY your competitors by having the best quality score.
So how exactly do you setup a system to continually split test your ads?
It’s not as hard as you think! Here’s how you do it in a nutshell :
- Sign up for Winner Alert. Winner Alert is a program that sends you weekly (or daily) reports of all the split tests in your account that have winning ads within a certainty of 95-99%. It takes 5 minutes to setup.
- Have the winner alert reports sent to an outsourcer and have then write a new ads for each winning ad by making a small change : switching description line 1 & 2, adding a question mark to the headline, etc, etc. If you have access to a copywriter and can afford the fee, have the copywriter write new compelling ads once you’ve gone through the whole gamut of possible small changes to your ad.
- Have your copywriter/outsourcer send you a file with : the winning ads, the new ads that are to compete with the winning ads, and the losing ads to be deleted. Make sure they’re all in Adwords editor format so you can quickly delete the losing ads and upload the winning ads through Adwords Editor. This is 5 minutes a week of work!
- Repeat the above process every week.
The real key here is understanding that you if want to win in the Adwords game long term you’ve go to think in terms of continually improvement otherwise you’re as good as dead.
Do YOU have a system in place to continually split test your ads, split your landing pages, and improve you landing page quality score?
YES!
You should split test ALL aspects of your business that can be tested, from Google Adwords ads, to your landing page and beyond.
You can also test headlines etc on your landing page. One of my customers did a split test on the headline for his landing page, which was designed to funnel traffic to an affiliate program. In that one test he increased the click-thru rate from 20%, to 60% – a 200% increase!
I’ll be writing a blog post on this shortly.
Paul Hancox
Some of these comments make me laugh…
Not everything is going to be handed to you on a silver platter, it takes work and work and more work to make money in any business, AM not excepted.
Kirt
Is there a good reference for learning AdWords Editor really well? Something that focuses on real world use cases rather than boring manual?