Testing is a great thing, but it’s also important to know when and how to pick a winner and reap the benefits of your hard work.
Choose strategic moments to remove your worse performing ads and apply
the lessons that you’ve learned. There are times, such as the holiday
shopping season when user search interest reaches its peak, when it’s in
your best interest to run with your best performing creative.
Testing sacrifices some short term efficiency to ultimately improve your
account in the long run. For that reason, there is an opportunity cost
to leaving your tests running longer than they need to. Take a look at
this example:
Ad A and Ad B have minor differences in performance, but Ad A still
generates two more leads at a cheaper rate. Here’s what the account
would look like running Ad A all by itself:
Even with the small differences in the example, there is a tangible
benefit to reallocating your impressions to the absolute best creative.
Imagine what could happen if all of those impressions in your account
(where the differences in CPC, CTR and conversion rate might be much
bigger than this example) are going to the best possible creative.
There are a number of different processes that you can follow (depending on your rotation settings) to get your best ads to show for those valuable holiday impressions.
If your campaign is using auto-optimization, we’ll automatically bias
impressions toward the ads that are statistically likely to perform
better. While poorly performing ads are already being shown
infrequently, it might also be time to cut out the fat.
Starting with your highest volume ad groups, identify the worst
performing ads and delete them. You’ll be able to spot them quickly
based on relatively poor performance and low impressions compared to the
top performers in their ad group.
If your ads are set to rotate evenly (or indefinitely), start with high
volume ad groups where ads have had enough impressions with which you
can confidently make a decision.
When manually optimizing, you’ll have to decide which metric is most
important to you. Consider creating your own metrics, such as
conversions/thousand impressions or revenue/thousand impressions.
As your tests are concluded, don’t restart them during your heavy
season. Let your top ads shine throughout your peak season, but keep
track of ad groups that are no longer testing (via labels) so that you
can easily restart your tests once things settle down.
Two things to remember for either of these processes:
- Make sure to look at your mobile-preferred ads separately from your
desktop ads, as these will likely perform differently than their desktop
counterparts.
- It's possible that certain keywords within an ad group perform best
with ads other than the top performer. This might happen in an ad group
comprised of disparately themed keywords (check your new-and-improved opportunities tab
for places this may be happening in your account). You can see the
performance of each ad against each keyword by segmenting your ad report
by keyword. One solution might be to separate such keywords into their
own ad group, so they can serve against the ad with which they perform
the best.
What if your ad tests don’t have enough data?
This happens all the time, particularly with smaller ad groups and campaigns. You’ll have three options to end these tests:
Directional: Pick the ad that is in the lead at this moment. It
couldn’t pass through any peer-reviewed scientific journals, but you’re
still basing your decision on recent performance.
Referential: Look for trends in messaging within your high volume
ad groups. If it’s the same basic test across both ad groups (i.e. one
main benefit against another), you can reasonably infer that the ads
will perform similarly. Ensure that whatever significant tests you
refer to are similar enough to make sense. You wouldn’t want your
successful messaging about shoes to decide how you’ll sell vacation
plans. Boots, however, could potentially apply the lessons from shoe
ads.
Indeterminate: Continue to wait until your tests get more
information, possibly enabling auto-optimization for your ads. Not
acting is a defensible decision, but it won’t improve your performance
immediately. Low volume ad groups are almost always going to continue
being low volume, so the sooner you get comfortable making decisions
with limited information on those ad groups, the sooner you could start
to see performance improve.
Whichever route you decide to take, you should still end up with two ads
in each of your ad groups - one for desktop and one for
mobile-preferred.
If you’re merely pausing your ads (since you don’t have enough traffic
yet), make sure that you’re labelling them intelligently and clearly so
that tests can be resumed once the time is right.
Ending tests doesn’t mean you’re against testing. Testing is a great
thing that leads to a healthy account and a well-informed, data-driven
advertiser. Ending a test is a little like pushing your car into the
red - you do it when you need to, but if you do it all the time you’re
going to eventually stall out.
This holiday season, treat your account right by cleaning out your low
performing ad copy. Then, when things slow down and you have a nice,
clean account to work with, you can restart your testing with something
new from our Creatives That Clicks whitepaper.