When taking over the management of pay-per-click campaigns with a substantial accumulated history, it is important to examine the three primary factors of most any PPC campaign: keywords, ads, and landing pages. While all these elements are important, let’s just focus on ads.
To test the effectiveness of the current ad being used, ad testing must be implemented in each ad group. We like to implement the “show ads evenly over time” setting in order to get a true read of how each ad responds in an equal amount of time. One ad will eventually separate itself from the other by having a higher clickthrough rate. In other words, one ad simply encourages a response more often than the other.
Recently, we implemented ad testing in a client’s campaign in order to test the effectiveness of their current ad. After two weeks of testing, the new ad we implemented was the clear choice to become the permanent ad. The clickthrough rate was significantly higher and the conversion rate was higher as well. We presented this new-found data to the client, who surprisingly refused to let the older, less effective ad be removed.
In their words, they liked the older ad because it was catchy and similar to their competitor’s ads. They thought that if their competitor was doing something, then maybe they should be doing it too. We attempted to explain the data again, but to no avail.
In summary, the objective data doesn’t lie. Historical data should make campaign decisions such as this one rather easy. The takeaway is that you should be partial to the data for each ad, not the actual ad itself.
