Google AdWords™ for Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter 13. How You Can't Help Becoming an Advertising Genius

In This Chapter

• Exploring split testing with AdWords

• Setting up simple and powerful split tests

• Declaring winning and losing ads

• Generating ideas to test

Most people find that writing an effective AdWords ad is challenging. In the old days (2004, actually), advertisers found their ads swatted down constantly by the 0.5% CTR (click-through rate) threshold. That is, not even 5 in 1,000 searchers would click their ad, and Google felt that an ad so unattractive did not deserve to remain active.

The difficulty of successful ad creation is understandable — you have 130 characters to convince someone to choose your offer over 19 other close-to-identical listings on the same page. Plus, writing good ads is tough in the best of circumstances.

Perry Marshall gave a talk in which he demonstrated the need for split testing by challenging audience members — professional marketers all — to choose the more effective ad or headline from a series of 10 split tests. The best of us got no more than 4 or 5 out of 10 correct. As we held our hands up high and proud for having achieved 50 percent on the test, Perry shot us down: "If I had flipped a coin, I would have done as well as you. Congratulations. You guys are as smart as a penny."

If you want to be smarter than a penny, you must apply the most powerful tool in the marketer's arsenal: split testing.

In this chapter, I show you how to set up split testing with AdWords and analyze the results. ...