Optimizing Ad Text for Conversion

Simply because an ad has a high click through rate does not mean that it is meeting your conversion goals. This may seem counter-intuitive at first, so lets use the following example that markets a fictional software product:

Example 1

CTR: 8%
Impressions: 5,000
G1/Visit: 2%


Example 2


CTR: 5%
Impressions: 1,250
G1/Visit: 8%


In this simplified example, lets assume that the Average CPC is $1 and the value of each conversion (software purchase) is $89.95.

Example 1: Of the 400 (5,000 * .08) people we brought to the site, 8 (400 * .02) bought our software package. In this case we spent $400 ($1 Average CPC) and made $719.60 (8 * 89.95). For every advertising dollar we spent, we made $1.79.

Example 2: Of the 63 people we brought to the site, 5 bought our software package.
In this case we spent $63 and made $449.75. For every advertising dollar we spent, we made $7.13!

Because AdWords optimizes ad rotation based on CTR, it is important to periodically test your ad creative to make sure that it is also meeting your conversion goals. This will help you achieve the right ratio of CTR and conversion events (without clicks there can be no conversions right?).

Assuming you have auto-tagging enabled in AdWords, your creatives are already tagged for you! However, it only tags the Headline, and it is common for many advertisers to use the same or similar headlines on all of their AdWords ads. In order to perform a creative test, we will need to create a new campaign for the explicit purpose of testing creative.

I will take a representative sample of my keywords for this test (I will temporarily bid higher on them to trump the existing keywords) and add two creatives that I would like to compare:



Notice the headline? I added the following " - " to one version so that I could distinguish them in the Analytics reports. This minor addition should not have much of an impact on this test because it does not significantly alter the messaging.

One more thing...

In the settings for my test campaign I will turn optimize ads off. This should allow the ads to rotate evenly so that I can compare performance on a more equal basis.




Once data has been collected, take a look at your analytics reporting.

Under the Content Optimization section open up the Ad Version Testing reports. For this example, I will choose "google[cpc]" from my Source Specific Testing report. This shows you the performance of all ads based on the headline.



Now we can cross-segment these reports by the test campaign to get our results.



In our final result we can see the statistics for each creative in our test campaign. For additional analysis, you can export this statistic and compare it to each creative in the test campaign.