Ad Copy Testing Best Practices

With ad copy testing you can determine and understand the type of ad messaging that converts better. This should be an ongoing task for PPCers as it helps give the audience and the businesses what they like.

We have broken down the process into three parts, the first part discusses the things to make a note of before you begin with ad testing, the second discusses the possible ideas for ad testing and the third discusses the different ways through which you can conduct your ad copy testing.

Here is a quick run-through of how you should go about running ad tests

What do you want to test?

The ad has variable components which could be picked individually and tested. Choosing one variable at a time helps draw a clear hypothesis than picking up more than one and not knowing which variable to associate the hypothesis with. Here are the components whose variations could be tested.

• Ad Copy
• Headline
• Call To Action
• Description
• Landing Page  etc.

What metric would you want to measure?

To analyse the test, you would also need to define what metric you would wish to measure to ascertain the success rate. Here are the list of the metrics that you could choose from:

• Clicks
• CTR
• CPA/ Cost per Conversion
• Conversion Rate
• ROAS

What metric you choose will depend on the goal that you have set for your test.

Create test ideas

For whatever part of the ad copy that you wish to test, you could create the many ideas around which the testing could be created. For example, if you wish to test the efficacy of your headlines, then you could test the following ideas:

• Deals, Offers or discount
• Call To Actions
• Products, features or services
• Key insights or trends etc.

Once you have run the tests the results will help you get an understanding of whether a specific offer/ deal works better than the other or which call to actions get the maximum response.

Now that you have, the to-do list of testing in place, we explore the ad copy testing ideas to help you get started with it easily:

Product Features/ Benefits

Your ad copy needs to address the user’s need. So, it makes a huge difference, what product features or benefits you highlight and where. The product features or benefits, which gives an insight about who you are, is worth testing as you would want to leave an impact on the user at the first level itself.

Call To Action

Depending on the business offering, it might matter where your call to action is placed. An ideal place to add your call to action is in the Headline 2/3 or Description 2. However, you would still want to test whether placing it in either Headline or Description or both has an impact on the response you receive.

Promotional Offers or Deals

You could check where the placement of an offer or deal can catch all the eyeballs. Not only does the placement of it matters, the message created needs to be full-proof in order to get a positive result.

Using Brand Name or Not

Again, depending on the goal set, you could check the impact of mentioning your brand in the ad messaging. Ideally if your goal is to generate brand awareness then adding your brand name in the ad copy could help. However, you would need to test it to get an assurance.

Landing Page

If you wish to check which landing page performs better, you could check it with the help of ad copy testing. This testing idea helps identify landing page that converts better and can contribute in lifting your campaign performance.

Here are some of the ways you could test your ad copy to identify the winning ads

Create ad copy variations on the platform

Create more than one variation of your ad and run them for satisfactory duration. Once they are able to generate some results, you can analyze them basis the metrics that meet your KPIs.

A/B Test With Google Ads

Google Ads has the option to create an alternate variation of your ad, without disrupting the current flow, with the help of Campaign Draft & Experiments. With this feature you can check an alternate set of settings and only once they give you convincing results, you can adopt those changes in your active campaign.

Karooya’s AdWords Script Helps Identify Poor Performing Ads

You could try our AdWords Script that helps you analyze your account for winning and poor performing ads. With the insights and recommendations shared from the report generated through this script, advertisers can take necessary action to optimize their ad and campaign performance.

To learn more about the script and how to use it, read here.

Create RSAs (Responsive Search Ads)

Let Google decide on which combination of Headlines and Description to choose from to optimize ad performance. You can provide a total of 15 Headlines and 4 Descriptions, out of which Google’s machine learning will test and analyze the best performing combination of 3 Headlines and 2 Descriptions

With these guidelines and your own learning experience, you can make ad testing an essential part of your PPC campaign planning.

Related Links:

• AdWords A/B Testing with Experiments
• How To Optimize Your Ad Copy in Google Ads?
• PPC Ad Copy Best Practices