Five Best Practices for Improving Google Adwords Creative

What is the difference between good creative and bad creative on Adwords? The strength of your testing regimen.

Great campaign results are the goal but if you do not understand why results are good or bad, then it will be impossible to scale your marketing for profitable growth. Testing provides you a framework for understanding why your campaign behaves in certain ways so that you can continually improve and scale your campaign profitably.

There is not a simple formula that you can apply to magically create great search advertising results, but here are five standard practices that you should incorporate into your Google Adwords practice to test and improve results:

1. Segment and Define the Variables: The key is to limit the variables between creatives so that you can understand why one may perform better than another. We recommend that you start with creative that has different titles and the same description and display URL. Using the different titles as the variable will help you understand which messages are driving the desired campaign results while using the same description and display URL limits the variables. Creating a list of benefits, features, customer needs, customer pain points, etc. as it relates to your service or product is a great place to start segmenting. As you start to learn about which messages work, you can begin experimenting with different descriptions.
2. Choose Your Success Metric: Every campaign has an objective (sales, leads, etc.); the purpose of the metric is to assign a quantifiable value to the successful achievement of the objective and use that to govern decisions made about the campaign before and during its run. For example, while the objective of the campaign might be to drive leads, the success metric states that the goal is to spend no more than $x per lead. The success metric helps you understand where money is being spent well.
3. Track your results: Tracking is the mechanism used to understand if the campaign is meeting its success metric. If the success metric can not be tracked on a daily basis, then either new tracking is required or the success metric needs to be adjusted. We recommend using Google Analytics – it is free and easy to install.
4. Statistics: This is your silver bullet. Utilizing statistics, you can determine with 99% certainty that one creative message will always perform better than the other. And by using statistics to continually monitor performance and evaluate tests, you can continually be improving your campaigns with certainty. Statistics is critical because it takes the guess work out of the evaluation. Often times creative will vary in performance but in many cases the variance might not be wide enough to justify any change – statistics helps you understand if the variance in the creative’s performance is real or not.
5. Practice Patience: The hardest part about creative testing is waiting it out. In many cases, the results will be below expectations and you will want to turn it off. Or sometimes it greatly exceeds expectations and you want to do more of it! Hold on tight and wait for the statistically valid signal that the results are in fact real. The tendancy is to ‘optimize’ the campaign each day when in fact, the best marketers are testing, reading results, and adjusting every day. The big difference is that at the end of each day, when you run a smart testing regimen, you know when, why, what, how and where your campaign got better and will get better – and that makes all the difference in the world.

A note about Auto-Optimization: Automated optimization tools, like those provided by the search engines or through third-party software, offer marketers an opportunity to improve the results of the campaign and to save a lot of time. The testing approach recommended in this post can be applied in conjunction with many auto-optimization technologies. Just remember, the goal of testing is to drive great results and provide the knowledge and understanding about why the campaign performs as it does.

If you need help setting up or managing a rigorous testing program for your Google Adwords creative or any other marketing program, contact Thrivepoint and we will be happy to assist you.