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Optimizing Google Ads: Using A/B Testing to Achieve Better Results

Optimizing Google Ads: Using A/B Testing to Achieve Better Results

You’ve just finished launching your first Search campaign. You did research on your target audience, created a solid list of keywords, and came up with some great ad copy. After running the campaign for a month, you start seeing pretty good performance numbers. You show the results to your boss who asks you the classic question “Can we get better results without spending more money?”

Stanley eye blink

No need to worry, because there IS a way to get more from your Google Ads campaign besides investing more dollars!

The Pieces of the Puzzle

Looking at that Search campaign you just built, it has several building blocks that influence the performance numbers you see. These can include:

  • Bid Strategy
  • Keywords
  • Ad Copy
  • Ad Assets
  • Landing Page

These different components are all dependent on one another and influence the overall performance of your campaign. Have a robust and vetted keyword list but poor ad copy? Your performance will go down. Have great ad copy but a poor Landing Page experience? Your performance will go down.

It’s when you find the optimal combination of these components that you’ll start seeing a steady increase in performance over time.

But how do you find out what a winning combination looks like to set up your campaign for success?

Enter A/B Testing!

The Formal Way vs. The Manual Way

If you need a refresher on the basics of A/B Testing, you can review our previous blog post. In a nutshell, A/B testing involves running two variations of something simultaneously to see which performs the best.

There are two ways to conduct A/ B testing within Google Ads; Using the Experiments Page that’s built into the Google Ads platform or manually creating and tracking tests. They each have their benefits and may be better suited for use depending on what you’re looking to test.

Since I’m a sucker for details and like to have more control over my experiments, I prefer using manual testing, and it’s what we’ll cover today.

Ad Experiments – The Old Fashion Way

Let’s say we wanted to conduct an A/B Test for our newly created Responsive Search Ad (RSA) in our Search Campaign. It has a decent Click-through Rate (CTR), but we want to see if changing the ad text makes a noticeable performance improvement.