Google AdWords™ For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Capturing the Magic of Split Testing

Nothing leads to improvement faster than timely and clear feedback. Although a million monkeys typing would eventually produce the entire works of Shakespeare, they would get there much faster if they got a banana every time they typed an actual word and an entire banana split when they managed a rhymed couplet in iambic pentameter. (Can you tell we've been reading Shakespeare For Dummies, by John Doyle and Ray Lischner?) And for every nonword, someone would chuck a copy of Typing Shakespeare For Monkeys at them.

Now suppose the monkeys could keep and understand a written record of the characters that produced bananas, banana splits, and no reward. After a while, you would see more and more real words and Shakespearean phrasing, and fewer xlkjdfsdfsr. Ouch!

AdWords contains the world's simplest mechanism for getting timely and clear feedback on your ads. You can create multiple ads, which AdWords shows to your prospects in equal rotation, and you can receive automatic and ongoing feedback.

Split testing is not an AdWords innovation. Direct marketers have been testing customers' response rates since Moses got two tablets of commandments. Reader's Digest used to choose headlines for its articles by sending postcards to readers, asking which articles they would be interested in reading in an upcoming issue. The list of articles was actually a ...