Ad Text Optimization – What to Test (and When)?

When you tell someone new to paid search marketing that they’ll be getting second feedback, that they’ll have a sea of data at their fingertips, and that the ability to test test test everything you do are powerful advantages to the channel, they invariably want to know “so what, exactly should I test?”
AdWords text ads are small and in some ways unassuming – when you reckon about testing landing pages it’s obvious that there are elements that could make a huge impact, but it’s sometimes less intuitive that ad text tests can and often do have an equally huge impact on results.
Let’s walk through some of the specific things you can test to best go the needle on ad text optimizations.
Test Huge Dreams First
A margin of the time with ad text optimization the real money improvements lie in major sea-shift changes in concept. Since it’s the holiday season let’s walk through an example of “personalized gifts” and talk a bit about some ad text tests we could set up. Here is the SERP for personalized gifts:

Let’s imagine we’ve been tasked with optimizing ad text for RushImprint.com.
As you’re making ad text tests, it’s vital to know various factors surrounding the ad text itself, including:
Your competitors
The keywords and search queries triggering the ad text
The landing page that the ad text drives to
We can see the competitors in the SERP listed above, and we’d surely want to log in to the Rush Imprint AdWords account to know which keywords and search queries are driving to this particular ad; for the purposes of simplicity in this example, we’ll just try to make a splendid ad for the term “personalized gifts”.
Next we’ll also want to know the searcher’s experience when they arrive at our landing page:

Just from this landing page there are some splendid dreams for ad text tests:
Free Shipping
Price Match Guarantee
Free artwork
There are also some opportunities to get inside the mind of a searcher and see if we can make ad text that resonates. What is this person looking for? What would motivate them to buy something personalized? What would motivate them to buy something personalized from us?
Initially, we’ll want to make some tests that offer a few fundamentally different concepts:

The business to note here is that each of these alternative ad dreams is based on a fundamentally different concept and appeals to an array of different motivations for the searcher. We have some excellent concepts here, but if we didn’t we could leverage some ordinary ad copy formats that are often successful. By running these alternative ad concepts, we can get real life feedback on which ads get clicked and which ads convert the best.
In this example we’re using a relatively large digit of ads. The keyword we’re testing ad text against is very broad, so a large digit of different concepts could potentially resonate best with the searchers – it’s valuable to float a lot of different concepts and appeal to a digit of different motivations to learn more about these searchers.
Additionally, we can assume that a broad term like personalized gifts has a reasonable amount of volume, and that we’ll be able to get to statistical significance relatively quickly even with a variety of ads. If you have an Ad Group with a limited amount of volume, it may make more sense to test only two ads so that you can get a definitive winner more quickly. If you’re wondering about the math behind statistical validity, Chad Summerhill has an outstanding ad text validity database that will help you pick a winner and be confident that your test is statistically valid.
Drilling Down on a Winning Concept
Once you have a concept that is really effective and a clear winner, you can then drill down to isolate and test specific elements within your concept. Things that you can test include:
Different supporting benefit statements – If our “Give Their Pet Gift” text won, we might deliberate testing the “price match” benefit versus the free shipping to see which is more attractive to searchers, or use different language than the gorgeous gifts (perhaps borrowing the enumerated items from the control).
Different Call to Action – Again assuming our “Give Their Pet Gift” text is the winner we could test a variety of different things with regards to the call to action, including leaving out the “Xmas” reference, trying to make more urgency by inverting the order of that call to action to be more along the lines of “Order today to Get it By Dec. 25th” (implying they’ll need to order straight away to get the gift by Christmas), or additional dreams nearly the call to action.
Different Show URL – The show URL can sometimes have a non-trivial impact on click-through rate and ultimately conversions. We could try some different things such as:
Personalized-Gifts.rushIMPRINT.com
rushIMPRINT.com/Personalized-Gifts
rushIMPRINT.com/Pet-Gift

So When Do I Stop Testing Ads?
Never! As you can see above there is a near-infinite digit of combinations that you can mix and match, and you should periodically be introducing new ad text concepts on your highest volume ad groups so that you can consistently and iteratively improve upon your ads’ performance. The way that people search changes constantly, and it’s crucial that your ad copy keep up and not leave percentage points in CTR and conversion percentage on the table.

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