02 FebTest and Optimise Your Campaigns with These Tips

How much of a difference will being in the first position, as opposed to the second, third or sixth position make, for your net profit? The answer is that it depends on your creative, industry and who else is bidding on your keywords. The bottom line is that you should know.

1.Test different creatives and positions

Test your creative in each position and work out where it will be most effective, from an ROI point of view. Remember also that the adwords ranking algorithm works on a CPCxCTR basis (it’s actually more complicated than that, but that gives an idea as to why out of two ads with similar CPC’s, one will be higher because of a higher CTR)

You can also test your creatives. Write 5 or 6 different ads and set them to run evenly (Google will run the one which performs best by default, but you can set them to run evenly in your campaign settings). The creative which gives you the highest ROI is the one you should go with. You should probably run this kind of test for more than just a day.

2. Optimise your landing page

The landing page is the page which the person who clicked on your ad will see when they come through to your site. Don’t use your homepage as your landing page unless it deals only with selling the product you’re advertising. For instance, if you’re selling posters, have a landing page for ‘flower’ posters and a landing page for ‘car’. You can even go one better and have a landing page for each poster – so you’ll have a page for ’sunflower posters’ and ‘bmw 5 series posters’.

3. Optimise your creatives

Optimising creatives is another topic entirely – but there are some easy wins (depending on, again, the strategy being appropriate for your campaign): one, for example, is using a keyword specific url. If you’re selling say Nike AirWalk shoes you might want to set the URL on your creative to display as: www.example.com/nike/nike-airwalk. Keep in mind that this has no relation to the real click through URL – but it looks better than your domain name – and certainly better than a long line of numbers. Keep this relevant however, because otherwise you could cheese people off if they don’t find what they’re looking for.

Another easy win is to not include superlatives, like ‘world’s best’ and ‘most loved product’ or ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. Google will just disapprove them. If you do mention a price or something else (like: the UK’s best selling mobile phone) then you must back that up on the landing page for the ad.

One of the most important things to remember that the ad copy is one of the most crucial things for making people click through. This sounds obvious, but there are a lot of very bad creatives out there.