It is an exciting time for search engine advertising as both Google and Bing embrace the potentials of Artificial Intelligence (AI). At Google’s annual IO event for developers, a new search experience was announced, featuring generative AI based on Google’s Lambda models.
The New Google Search Experience unveiled at Google I/O on May 10, 2023 integrates generative AI
Mirroring this, Microsoft’s Bing has been leveraging its ChatGPT integration for some time now.
So, what does this mean for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertisers?
In essence, the landscape remains largely familiar. Advertisers will continue to target keywords, manage bids, set budgets, and run campaigns. The key difference is that the ads will now appear not just on search results pages, but also alongside generative AI components.
Generative AI and PPC Advertising: A New Intersection
Bing has already shown how chat can seamlessly incorporate advertising. Upon user interaction with the chat, Bing translates the user’s prompt into a search keyword.
Bing shows users how their chats are turned into keywords which determine what ads might be shown
The same keyword, when entered into Bing chat and Bing search, yields similar ads, demonstrating a consistent user experience across modalities. The inclusion of ads in the chat experience is a novel way to engage with users and could potentially increase visibility and reach.
Ads in Bing’s chat experience
With Google’s recent announcement, this model is expected to find broader application. Ads are likely to start appearing alongside the AI chat experiences in the new search interface, although currently, there are no additional controls or settings for advertisers to specifically target or tweak this placement.
The Reporting Challenge and Future Prospects
One downside to the integration of generative AI with PPC advertising is the current lack of distinct reporting for ad performances next to the chat versus regular search experiences. This makes it challenging to evaluate the effectiveness of ads within these new interactive environments.
User interaction with ads on search results pages versus within AI chat experiences is an interesting area to watch. As both Google and Microsoft continue to fine-tune their chat-based solutions, there could be significant implications for how ads are displayed, targeted, and bid on.
Staying Ahead in the AI Era of PPC Advertising
At present, the best advice for advertisers is to immerse themselves in these new developments. Try out the new search experiences on Google and Bing, and explore firsthand what these changes look like. As we journey into this new era of PPC advertising, staying informed and adaptable will be key.
As these new technologies continue to evolve, we can expect further shifts and new opportunities in the PPC advertising landscape. Stay tuned for updates and insights as we navigate this exciting frontier. The AI revolution in search engine advertising has just begun, and it promises to be a fascinating journey ahead.
Should you pause your ads when products go out of stock? That was the question raised on Search Engine Land recently. I explained that as with any answer in PPC, it depends.
If you’re used to being in a top ad slot for a query, it’s worth defending your position by keeping ads on, even when the exact product the consumer searched for is temporarily unavailable.
If, on the other hand, you’re not usually the best match for what the user searched for, it’s fine to pause the ad to preserve the budget for your other conquests.
Sidenote: If you just want to pause ads for broken landing pages, or landing pages with text that indicates a product isn’t available, you can use our Broken URL Checker tool.
But if you want to do better, you can use our Campaign Automator solution. In this post, I will share the quickest and easiest way to use that tool to keep ads running all the time while automatically directing clicks to an alternative page on your site when a product goes out of stock.
Our solution can be managed completely by the person in charge of the Google Ads account and doesn’t require any technical assistance from your web development team.
Send users to a backup landing page when products are out of stock
Step 1: Create the Campaign Automator template for in-stock products
Connect your inventory data, like that in a Google Merchant Center feed, to Campaign Automator.
Then, set an inventory condition so that only products that are in stock will be processed by the template.
Now, create your template as you normally would with Campaign Automator. Add campaigns, ad groups, ads, extensions, keywords, bids, etc. Check out our help article for Campaign Automator if you’ve never done this before.
Because you’re going to take users to the specific landing page for the product they searched for, this template’s landing pages will use the product detail pages on your site.
Step 2: Duplicate the template you just created
To duplicate the template, use the hamburger menu to the right of your template name and select the option ‘Duplicate’.
Step 3: Change the inventory conditions and landing pages
Because you want this template to be used ONLY when the other template you just made is not used, you’ll have to swap the inventory conditions. So where before we said ‘Units in stock’ had to be greater than 0, now we should set a mutually exclusive condition, in this case: ‘Units in stock’ is equal to 0.
Finally, go to the ad group settings and change the landing pages. In this case we want the landing pages to be the product listing pages or category pages. So for example, if the user searched for a specific type of flatscreen TV which is out of stock, you can show them a page of similar TVs that are in stock.
Step 4: Automate both templates
To make sure consumers always have the best experience with your ads, it’s best to automate both Campaign Automator templates so that they will create, pause, and re-enable the right dynamically generated ads in your account as inventory conditions change.
Conclusion
Because the inventory conditions you’ve set up in your two new Campaign Automator templates are opposites, only one condition can be true at a time so only one of the two templates will enable an ad at any time.
This means that you will always have an ad for all your selected keywords, but when the keyword is for an in-stock product, it will lead users to the product detail page where they can purchase exactly what they wanted, whereas if the product is out of stock, they will be presented with great alternatives and perhaps still make a purchase from your site.
If you don’t subscribe to Campaign Automator, let us know and we’ll be happy to show you all it can do to make your PPC ads more effective.
Moving a step closer to near-total PPC automation, Google Ads announced that starting from July 2022, Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) will be the only search ad type in standard search campaigns.
Starting June 30, 2022, responsive search ads will be the only Search ad type that can be created or edited in standard Search campaigns. (Existing expanded text ads will still serve.)
Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) are comfortable and offer more control over what ad text you want to show to your audience. But Responsive Search Ads do improve ad performance when combined with human optimization and creativity.
Since none of us can force Google to roll back their announcement, the best thing to do is adapt to RSAs.
Here’s how Optmyzr can help you build good Responsive Search Ads.
How Optmyzr helps you craft high-quality Responsive Search Ads
We’ve been handing PPC experts control of their advertising destiny for a while, so it’s no surprise that the Optmyzr platform comes with several tools to manage and optimize Responsive Search Ads. Here are some of the things you can do.
1. Find winning components in the Ad Text Optimization tool
The Ad Text Optimization tool lets you find the best-performing headlines, descriptions, and other components from your current text ads. Use these winning components in the next step to craft RSAs using ad text that’s been proven to win you clicks and conversions.
We’re working on adding Responsive Search Ad support for the Ad Text Optimization tool so you can start tracking the performance of your RSAs more closely.
2. Create new RSAs in the Responsive Search Ads Utility
Our Responsive Search Ads Utility is an easy solution to create RSAs in your ad groups that don’t currently have any. It offers suggestions for headlines and descriptions, making the process faster and easier.
Use the winning ad text components from your ETAs here, but be sure to account for the RSA behavior of mixing and matching headlines and descriptions. You’ll want to tweak your ad text so that each component can stand on its own as well as be part of a larger message.
If your advertising vertical demands that you pin certain messages, now’s the time to do that. Even otherwise, you can pin minimally if something really demands to be seen in a certain position. Just don’t go overboard.
Watch our latest walkthrough of the Responsive Search Ads Utility:
And learn more about how to create RSAs using Optmyzr here.
3. Find and fix underperforming Responsive Search Ads
Most search ads that run on Google are poorly crafted, which is why even a basic copywriting effort will usually lead to good performance. But when you have up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, a Responsive Search Ad containing weak ad text tends to underperform on an even larger scale.
Fortunately, we created a handy RSA guide a while back. In it, you’ll find information on how to create a good Responsive Search Ad, how to improve your RSA ad strength, and how to audit and fix underperforming RSAs using Optmyzr.
The audit section, which is usually one of the more challenging parts, is easier thanks to our rule-based (if x, then y) strategy that you can run and automate using our powerful Rule Engine.
So what now for PPC pros who rely on Expanded Text Ads?
Expanded Text Ads are comfortable, reliable, and offer you more control over what messages get shown when. Responsive Search Ads can improve performance when combined with human optimization and creativity.
The best solution is to use both, but since we can’t force Google to roll back their announcement, the next best thing is to use the 10-month runway ahead of us to adapt.
Building good RSAs takes time and patience, so don’t give up. Test, test, and then test some more. All great campaigns are built on exhaustive experimentation!
Over the past two weeks, we’ve looked at two core facets of any search campaign: writing ad text that’s designed to convert, and diversifying ad types to attract a wider audience.
This week, I want to discuss the third part of the process: optimizing your campaigns to improve their performance.
As every PPC marketer knows, taking a campaign live is when the testing and learning really begin. Using the insights that follow is how you develop a strong foundation into a memorable, profitable campaign.
Let’s take a look at 5 ways you can optimize existing campaigns to drive additional traffic and better conversions.
1. Understand the point of testing
Imagine you’re in a mall shopping for clothes. What makes you decide to enter a store? Is it the window display? That big sale with 50% discounts? Points or cashback on your credit card?
The store won’t know until they ask; testing and identifying what really helps. Your PPC campaigns work in a similar way.
You could have drafted the best ad copy ever — proposing value, mentioning promotions. But until you test it in a way designed to provide answers, you won’t know if the ad text works or which parts are most enticing to users.
2. Pause ads that aren’t converting
Performance metrics like click-through rate, conversion rate, and conversions to impressions served can help you identify if your ads resonate with users. After your ads have served for enough time or won enough impressions, you can begin testing them.
Traffic for each ad group will vary, which is why testing ads is a continuous process. This ensures that as soon as some of your ad groups have served the right amount of traffic, you can:
Test ad groups with significant performance data
Test ads with a similar number of impressions to find a winner
PPC expert and long-time Optmyzr customer Isaac Rudansky shared his best practices in this blog, explaining how Optmyzr can help you test your ads more effectively.
3. Turn winners into champions
The next step is to test your ad components to find messaging that works the best across your campaigns. Some cool ways to manage ad content better include:
Find high-performing headlines or descriptions from specific campaigns to create appealing Responsive Search Ads.
Find ad components that are used less frequently but perform well. Use that text to create new ads that replace low-performing ones.
Find ad text that’s being used too frequently, and create new variations to test further.
4. Keep seasonality in mind
As important as it is to keep updating your ad text and content, it’s equally vital to keep updating any seasonal offers.
For example, running Christmas ads weeks after the season ends is a fundamental advertising blunder. Avoid mistakes like this by running audits of ad text and replacing these out-of-date ads with new content.
As an aside, you can also use the Rule Engine in Optmyzr to automatically pause campaigns based on seasonality or holiday timing. Find out more about that here.
5. Enhance existing campaigns
There’s always a way to add a new edge to your ads, whether it’s through components you haven’t used or a change in strategy. Here are some ways to take your campaigns to the next level:
Leverage ad extensions (use at least 3 types).
Test your landing pages to find which URLs perform best.
Find new ad group themes and make them more query-focused.
Implement SKAGs (single keyword ad groups) for keywords with low Quality Score to build ads specific to each keyword.
Conclusion
When it comes to optimization, testing is the most important component. Until your ads have served long enough to get some strong data behind them, it can be difficult to gauge just what is and isn’t working.
The further you get along this journey, the quicker and more scalable your optimization needs to be. If you’d like to see how Optmyzr can make this experience more seamless, you can try our platform completely free for 14 days — no credit card required!
If you have any other questions, write to us at support@optmyzr.com and we’ll be happy to start a conversation!
In last week’s post, we talked about why it’s important to take the time to write ads that resonate with your target audience — and to update them periodically.
So you’ve written some ads and they’re performing well. How do you take it to the next level and move the performance needle?
This week, I’ll show you how your client or business can benefit from experimenting with different ad types on the Search network.
What ad types can drive the results you want?
The amount of diversity within Google’s selection of Search ads is considerable, and different ad types are better suited to different business goals. Today, I want to talk about three of the more popular choices if you’re just getting into writing PPC ads.
1. Dynamic Search Ads
Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) according to Google:
Dynamic Search Ads are the easiest way to find customers searching on Google for precisely what you offer. Ideal for advertisers with a well-developed website or a large inventory, Dynamic Search Ads use your website content to target your ads and can help fill in the gaps of your keyword based campaigns.
When you run a DSA, Google uses structured website data to automatically create headlines and descriptions, and links landing pages that match user queries to your ad.
While a DSA might not offer the control and flexibility to customize or edit ad text, it’s the ideal way to get started with new PPC accounts — provided you have the web content and landing pages to support it.
Once Google starts generating DSAs, keep a close eye on their performance. You can use the best-performing headlines and descriptions in targeted Search ads or other types of specialty ads.
2. Expanded Text Ads
Expanded Text Ads (DSA) according to Google:
Expanded text ads are similar to the text ads that you’re used to, but with a few key differences:
Expanded text ads have three headline fields… the third is optional.
Expanded text ads also have two 90-character description fields.
The domain of your display URL is based on your final URL domain.
The display URL can include two optional “Path” fields.
Expanded text ads are mobile-optimized.
Running an ETA is entrusting Google’s machine learning to figure out what works best for your business. All you do is enter a combination of different text elements — make sure these aren’t just variants of the same message, but distinctly different value propositions and calls to action.
My recommendation is to create three or four ETAs using combinations of distinct headlines and descriptions within one ad group. Once these ads start performing, you can run additional tests to identify which ad copy yields better CTRs or conversion rates
And while you test your ads, you can also create variations of them to drive better performance. Some of the advantages of ETAs include being able to:
Retain control of ad text
Enjoy the freedom to be creative
Promote value or offers as individually themed ad groups
Set different campaign goals for each ad group
Add keywords to ad text to improve CTR
3. Responsive Search Ads
Responsive Search Ads (DSA) according to Google:
Responsive search ads let you create an ad that adapts to show more text — and more relevant messages — to your customers. Enter multiple headlines and descriptions when creating a responsive search ad, and over time, Google Ads will automatically test different combinations and learn which combinations perform best.
RSAs allow you to expand your reach to show on inventories you might be missing with ETAs (quality score and bids).
Choose this ad type if you’d like to rely on Google’s disruptive methodology to find the right combinations of headlines and descriptions from the options provided to show ads created to respond to specific user queries.
When running an RSA, make sure that:
The different headlines and descriptions don’t contain repetitive content related to price or promotions, so that all the text chosen in the ads are unique.
Each headline and description is complete in itself, so that the ad text pieced together by Google makes sense.
Remember that you can only have up to three RSAs in one ad group, and Google recommends running at least one in each.
The million-dollar question: All for one, or one for all?
Once your account is up and running, a combination of RSAs and ETAs can help you strike a balance between controlling your ad text and exploring new opportunities to show your ads.
While you set up these ad types, remember to create variations of ETAs — as well as the headlines and descriptions of RSAs — while keeping in mind the traffic you expect your ad group to serve:
Low-Traffic Ad Group (under 5,000 impressions every 30 days): Two ETAs and one RSA with four to six headlines and two to three descriptions
Medium-Traffic Ad Group (5,000 to 15,000 impressions every 30 days): Three ETAs and one RSA with eight to ten headlines and three to four descriptions
High-Traffic Ad Group (15,000+ impressions every 30 days): Three to five ETAs and two RSAs with different variations of four to six headlines and two to three descriptions per ad
This approach to ad creation should allow for earlier identification of winners — for Google to find better-performing headlines and descriptions, and to identify the better-performing ads based on A/B testing.
Conclusion
As always, keep a close eye on your campaigns — especially in the early stages of using a new ad type. You might discover something that affects ad performance that can be sorted out quickly.
A tool like Optmyzr can be of use. The Ad Text Optimization tool lets you import existing campaign data to find your best performing headlines and descriptions (with tracking templates), and we also have a feature that can help you build RSAs within our platform.
In the next blog post, I’ll show you how to optimize your ads and ad text to drive even better results. In the meantime, you might want to look at Google’s resource directory for ads and campaigns to better understand these (and other) ad types.
Across this three-part search ad masterclass, I’ll share insights I’ve picked up from working with some of the world’s most successful PPC strategists.
Insights that will help you:
Create and optimize successful ad text
Decide which types of ads will get you the best results
Identify what works and what doesn’t — and double down on the former
Let’s kick things off with how you can write ads designed to win high-quality clicks that are actually relevant to your business.
Why relevant ad text drives clicks
Think of your PPC campaign’s ads as the window displays in a store, which are often a shopper’s first point of engagement. All your hard work winning an ad auction could be nothing more than an empty time-sink if your ads aren’t written to get clicks from people who want your product or service.
And despite all the automation implemented by Google, writing ads that get clicks still relies on the creativity of account managers.
Just as store displays are changed frequently to continue attracting traffic, so too is it important to keep updating PPC ads with fresh promotions — always while highlighting your value proposition.
A regular refresh to ad text that keeps up with industry trends frequently improves the chances of getting relevant clicks on your ads.
How to write ad text like a winner
The image below shows ad results for the search term “buy women shoes”. The ad in first position is a great example of how to utilize the space provided by Google to promote value proposition via ad extensions and promotions.
Even if this ad had only won second position, I would still be very likely to click on it:
It’s hyper-relevant to my search.
The offer is highlighted clearly.
I know exactly where to find them.
A quick glance at the two ads placed lower reveal flaws that might have intrigued a click if they:
Used ad text that resonates better with my query
Highlighted unique value points and accessory benefits
Added promotions, discounts, or factors to build user trust
Taking ad text to the next level
Along with ad text that’s relevant to a user’s search, another aspect of your ads that can make a difference to performance is which ad type you select.
Google offers multiple ad types to help you advertise in a way that’ll help you achieve your PPC goals. If we’re sticking with Search ads, there are two highly popular ad types you can run in addition to regular search ads.
Expanded Text Ads are popular with PPC strategists working across industries. Expanded Text Ads let you create an ad with three static headlines and two descriptions. It offers ample space to convey your company’s value proposition, and those of the products and services being advertised.
Responsive Search Ads are a type of ad that automates the process of A/B testing. Google allows you to define up to 15 headlines and four descriptions, and A/B testing is automated. Google’s machines experiment to find the combination of headlines and description that are predicted to work best for specific user queries.
Conclusion
If you’re advertising on Google’s Search network, your ad text and choice of ad type play crucial roles in the performance of your campaigns — for both Expanded Text Ads and Responsive Search Ads.
Creating search campaigns that get quality clicks is as simple as this four-step process:
Select ad types intelligently.
Write relevant ad text that highlights value.
Create well-structured ad group themes.
Refresh your ads periodically.
Once you start seeing results from your campaigns and need support managing them at scale, a tool like Optmyzr can help you make bulk ad text changes across all your campaigns in just a few clicks. Next week in part 2 of this series, we’ll further explore these ad types — plus one more that might get you additional results. In the meantime, check out this support article from Google for more amazing tips to help you write successful ads.
Copywriting is one of the most versatile tools in a PPC marketer’s skill set for a reason. After all, words are the foundational building block of most channels, including paid search advertising.
But all the data in the world means precious little if you can’t craft messaging that drives conversions.
Today, we’re talking about our Ad Text Optimization tool and how it helps PPC marketers deliver ads with copy that works during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here are five things it can help you achieve for your businesses and clients.
1. Let people know about operating changes.
This pandemic has forced businesses to rethink the way they operate. Government-enforced social distancing restrictions limit the number of people who can be in a store at once. On top of this, many employers have implemented new policies to limit their staff’s exposure to potential carriers of the virus.
With the Ad Text Optimization tool, you can make bulk edits to your ads that reflect any new operating conditions so that consumers know what to expect when they do business with you.
Use Cases
• Announce a full switch to curbside pickup for a big box retailer.
• Advertise a restaurant or cafe’s switch from dine-in to takeout only.
• Inform consumers of timings adjustments for stores normally open 24 hours.
2. Tell people about your new product experience.
For some verticals, there’s just no way around giving people a chance to see, touch, and feel the product. In other cases, the product is an experience. Either way, prevailing conditions demand that businesses get creative about providing this interaction in a safe environment.
The Ad Text Optimization Tool lets advertisers make sweeping changes to their campaigns to let consumers know about changes to methods of delivery, product experience, and more.
Use Cases
• Offer test drives at the customer’s doorstep instead of having to visit a dealership.
• Advertise mobile mini-shops with core hardware and home improvement SKUs.
• Announce a shift to virtual delivery for experiential services like yoga classes.
3. Keep up with implementation and easing of restrictions.
While much of the US, UK, and Europe are already sheltering in place, things are changing as we learn more about COVID-19. Local, state, and federal regulations are likely to be modified regularly as governments make new discoveries and observe medical data.
Whether you need to make regular updates, create new ads, or manage ads for multiple locations, the Ad Text Optimization tool gives you the power to create ads that are more likely to perform.
Use Cases
• Restart advertising for a non-essential business exiting regional lockdown.
• Publish in-store social distancing regulations for a barbershop.
• Announce geo-based store openings and closures for a franchise brand.
4. Be sensitive to prevailing conditions.
One of the biggest challenges for advertisers is making sure ads don’t come across as insensitive or tone deaf. Many phrases that are perfectly acceptable in a non-pandemic environment can be questionable when deployed today.
It can be difficult to manually track all these phrases across your campaigns and ads. The Ad Text Optimization Tool lets you search for and replace them in just a few clicks.
Use Cases
• Replace phrases like ‘go viral’ or ‘breathtaking’ when advertising your product.
• Avoid otherwise-appropriate words like ‘happy’ or ‘delighted’.
• Insert phraseology to discourage hoarding or advertise seniors-only windows.
5. Get new insights more quickly, and act on them.
It’s not just the markets that are volatile right now. Consumer sentiment is changing rapidly based on new developments — that includes search behavior. One of Google’s tips for account managers is to plan weekly, rather than monthly or quarterly.
To make weekly planning feasible, you need data on how your ad text influenced performance. The Ad Text Optimization tool lets you compare ads side by side with metrics including CTR, conversions, impressions, and more.
Use Cases
• Compare ads offering delivery and pickup to see which one performed better.
• Help a brick and mortar produce store quickly build accounts and start running ads.
• Scale the acquisition and application of new insights across multiple accounts.
Less time. Fewer mistakes. Better results.
The Ad Text Optimization tool significantly reduces the time and energy cost of making copy edits across your ads and campaigns. And it makes the exact same edit you want wherever it occurs — no gaps, no missed instances.
To learn more about this tool and its different features, check out our user guide. The Optmyzr team is also working from home, ready and available to help PPC professionals deliver value for their businesses and clients during this challenging time.
There’s nothing as terrifying as doing something no one has ever done before. And yet, that’s the boat we all find ourselves in.
COVID-19 is mankind’s first major tryst with the unknown in a long time, which means there are no roadmaps or strategies to get through this. We’re all wandering down this same new path together.
From healthcare to advertising, no industry is immune to the challenges this presents. While doctors don’t yet fully know how to treat patients, marketers remain unsure of how to respond to different situations. There’s no data to pull, no machine learning to lean on, no lessons from the past that apply directly.
All we can do is trust our instincts.
Advertisers can use the downtime to streamline complex processes
So it’s reassuring to see that the first reaction of most marketers and brands right now is to do the right thing. Take a look through the news or your LinkedIn feed, and chances are you’ll quickly come across a global CEO or small business owner who’s shifted focus from profit margins to supporting their people, communities, healthcare professionals, and frontline workers.
Rising to the challenge: Rallying the PPC community
With behaviors changing across the spectrum, PPC professionals and brands everywhere are trying to solve problems for which there is no historical data. This is where the PPC community needs to deploy that extra bit of creativity — treating the situation with seasonality, studying Google Trends to inform countermeasures and, most importantly, sharing our learnings with each other.
In a piece for SearchEngineLand titled “Paid search ad copy strategies during coronavirus”, Ginny Marvin shares with marketers three core approaches to writing effective, meaningful, and mindful ads during the ongoing pandemic.
“If there’s one thing this crisis has shown, it’s the ingenuity of businesses to rethink entire processes and business models,” she writes. “Be sure your ad copy reflects how your company is responding to this new environment.”
Are you communicating how your brand is adapting to the ‘new normal’?
Of course, it’s not just marketers who are sharing new ‘best practices’ for these uncharted waters. Google has chipped in with a handy help document full of great advice on how to approach your PPC advertising campaigns during COVID-19.
Takeaways from Google’s campaign tips for COVID-19… and How Optmyzr can help
Google also provides tips on adapting to dynamic market conditions
1. The words you choose matter. Right now, words that would otherwise be perfectly fine to use might not have the context you want them to. Terms like “checkup” or “protection” are just two of the many that Google recommends being careful with, but they also advise marketers to be cognizant of regional terminology that may be in use.
Bulk adjust ad copy to be more mindful of the current situation in your markets
2. Stay on top of logistics and inventory. With supply chains heavily disrupted, the last thing you want is for customers to place orders that can’t be fulfilled. Google suggests editing ads to make sure you account for operational realities like timings, delivery, and in-store pickup.
Tip: TheCampaign Buildercan help you automate your ads based on business data like which products are in stock and which are on back-order.
Automate shopping ads to be more accurate and up-to-date
3. Review, review, review. Every aspect of your communication matters; not just your copy. To quote Google, this includes “images and videos that show large gatherings of people or human interaction, the tone of your headlines, descriptions, and landing pages.”
4. Stay aware. Google recommends keeping track of the pulse in your areas of business via their Trends page to better understand how your customers think, feel, and act at this time. This will help you better communicate in a way that will be well-received.
Tip: Check out Optmyzr’s newCOVID-19 PPC Analysis Tool, which annotates PPC charts with dates when local and federal governments enacted restrictions like shelter-in-place or store closures.
Get granular insights by adjusting metrics and geographies for different campaigns
5. Remain flexible. Above all, Google’s help document highlights the importance of being able to pause and pivot with agility. Conversion rates might call for adjustments to your bids, and ad groups or campaigns for high-demand products might need to be paused quickly when you run out of stock.
Use the Non-Converting Search Queries recipe to weed out low-converters
Doing the right thing in unfamiliar times
While the sudden appearance of COVID-19 has put businesses into vastly different situations, there is more that unites us. Now more than ever, it’s paramount that we all do the right thing.
If your business is able to continue spending marketing dollars, we encourage you to plan initiatives that support healthcare professionals, frontline workers, and vulnerable people. Be mindful of the words and images you select for blog posts, landing pages, search and display ads, and e-commerce listings.
If you’re experiencing a lull, leverage the downtime to improve your relationships with internal and external stakeholders. Reconnect with your employees, build backup plans for the brands you nurture, and develop flexible processes to quickly scale up to usual levels of spend when the storm passes.
In the meantime, we’re here to help soften the blow for our customers and the PPC industry as best we can. Let us know if we can help. Our team is working from home and ready to continue delivering great support.
Optimizing your bids and budgets is most definitely an important part of successful account management, however, even great bids with a precise budget can perform negatively if the ad’s text doesn’t really catch any attention.
To better manage your ads from every angle, we have created a tremendously powerful tool that’ll help you analyze not only the text contained in your headlines and descriptions but also how they work in line with each other: Ad Text Optimization.
What does the Ad Text Optimization tool do?
Optmyzr’s Ad Text Optimization tool helps you break down and review your ads’ performance by its components. You can view data by Headline 1, Headline 2, Headline 3 (where available), Description 1, Description 2, the full ad, Path 1, Path 2, the combination of Path 1 with Path 2, and Headline 1, 2, and 3 together.
In the following example, you can see the performance of this ad as a whole, with 151 clicks and a CTR of 20.60%
But when we break it down by parts you can see how each component works on its own:
Headline 1:
Headline 2:
Description 1:
Headline 1 & 2 combined:
Why this is important
By analyzing the text contained in your ads, you can get a better sense of what works, and what doesn’t. Keep in mind that an overall good ad can still be negatively influenced by a low performing component within – even if the rest work well!
We are used to investing the most time in making sure the budget is allocated in an optimal way, the CTR is high, and the conversions are high quality, but sometimes we forget what makes a person click on an ad, and that is the message contained in the text. With the new insights you’ll derive from the new Ad Text Optimization tool, we hope to make you a more effective digital marketer.
No time wasted – Make bulk changes!
Another great feature inside this tool is the Find-and-Replace option, which allows you to make bulk changes to ad components. This feature can be used in several ways, for example, to replace the word(s) in individual ad components, several ad components, or anywhere it’s found in any ad text component. You can also choose whether you want to create new ads or update existing ones with your change.
For example, say some of your ads contain “2019” in their headline or description text, but the year is coming to an end, so you want to start promoting services for 2020. Instead of going through every ad in your account, with the Ad Text Optimization tool you can simply go to the Find and Replace feature and tell it to replace every text in any component of your existing ads that have “2019”, with “2020”.
You could also use the tool to quickly start new A/B tests for ads. For example, you could create new versions of all ads with the text ‘free trial’ but try the variation ‘try it free’. Starting this test takes just seconds with the new tool and after some data has started to accrue, you can use our existing AB Testing for Ads tool to find winners, and remove losers.
As easy as 1, 2, 3!
Stay tuned for more of our awesome tools and features!
Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) were announced by Google Ads last year and are now available for all advertisers globally. This new ad format allows you to enter up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, all of which should work together to produce a compelling ad.
Responsive Search Ads
If you’ve been holding off on adding RSAs to all your ad groups because the process of coming up with 15 great headlines and 4 descriptions is too time-consuming, Optmyzr has a great time-saving tool to help. It suggests ad text components from your existing expanded text ads and allows quick edits across entire campaigns. This post will show you how the RSA Builder from Optmyzr can help you quickly deploy RSAs across all the accounts and campaigns you manage.
What are Responsive Search Ads
For this new ad format, Google Ads’ system uses machine learning (ML) to put together the best combination of headlines and descriptions, taken from the ad text components you’ve provided. By having multiple headlines and descriptions to work with, your ad’s message can be better tailored to each user’s unique query, thereby reaching more potential customers.
This Responsive Search Ad format also adapts very well to different devices and has the potential to increase the overall ad group performance.
At Optmyzr we’re committed to making PPC account management as simple and hassle-free as possible, so to help with this new ad format, we created the Responsive Search Ad Builder, which works by gathering the ad components from your current expanded text ads and using them to generate suggestions for the headlines and descriptions that’ll be contained in your new Responsive Search Ads.
The way it works is straightforward, you’ll first choose the campaign to work on, and which source we should use to suggest new ad text components. You’ll also see the option to add more headlines and/or descriptions (up to 15H and 4D) and modify the path 1 & 2, and the final URL. As always, nothing will be created or uploaded without your final approval.
One of the great benefits of our tool is that you can approve all new RSAs at once or review them one by one, and then upload them in bulk directly to your Google Ads account.
Responsive Search Ads are a great way to display more relevant ads and improve your reach to more prospective customers, by helping you compete in more auctions that would otherwise require creating multiple ads. We explained the incremental nature of RSAs in our monthly column on Search Engine Land.
How to create RSAs with Optmyzr
To get started you’ll be selecting the campaign to work on, and how we’ll be suggesting new ad text components. This can be either from all active ads in the campaign or all active ads within the same ad group, the latter being the most common and recommended option.
Once you’ve selected which settings to use, you’ll go straight into the tool where you’ll have all the ad groups displayed to the left side and all the ad components towards the right side. The ad groups marked with orange have not been reviewed, and therefore no changes will be made. Once you edit, review and approve the changes, they will turn to green, which means they’ll be added to the list of RSAs to be uploaded.
The suggestions showed for headlines and descriptions can be modified for only that ad group, of for every ad group which is using that piece of text. This makes a great way for bulk edit and creation of RSAs. Likewise, you can add a new headline or description and in the same way use it only for that ad group, or for all ad groups.
Once you’ve edited and approved the ads you want to upload, simply press on “Review and Upload Approved Ads” and you’ll see a final summary of what will be created. From then, and with your approval, your changes will go live in Google Ads.
Optmyzr’s Responsive Search Ads Builder is a great way of making bulk modifications and RSA creation across your campaigns. It’s time-saving, simple to use and very convenient, as it would otherwise take much longer to do this process one by one.
Single keyword ad groups—or SKAGs—are an AdWords strategy that puts one keyword in each of your campaign’s ad groups. SKAGs give PPC marketers more control over raising click-through rates, managing bids, and achieving high Quality Scores.
Yet many AdWords accounts are built to match a company’s website structure with as many as 20 keywords per ad group. Why aren’t SKAGs more mainstream? Google doesn’t expressly advocate them, so it’s not a strategy people encounter when they first learn AdWords. In fact, the 20 keyword per ad group guidance comes from Google itself.
That advice can point new PPC marketers in a direction that denies them the benefits of single keyword ad groups. In this post, we’ll lay out those benefits and the fastest way to build SKAGs we developed here at Optmyzr.
Main Advantages of Single Keyword Ad Groups
Higher CTRs
Better Quality Scores.
Easier bid management.
Higher rankings, lower costs.
Let’s look more closely at how SKAGs create each benefit.
1. Click-Through Rates
We know ads matching search queries are more likely to earn the clicks that drive PPC performance. Multi-keyword ad groups make that alignment less likely because one ad can show for multiple keywords. The more that happens, the more clicks you risk losing by having less relevant ads. A single-keyword ad group structure ensures you serve ads precisely matching what a searcher wants to find, especially when using SKAGs and exact match, making your ad more relevant and more likely to get clicks.
2. Quality Scores
Quality Score is Google’s way of showing how well your ad performs in the AdWords auction. Quality Scores are based on your landing page experience, how relevant your ad is, and how likely it is to earn clicks. SKAGs directly make ads more relevant to keywords, which in turn gives them a higher expected click-through rate. Both signals tell AdWords you’ve got a great ad that deserves a higher Quality Score.
3. Bid management
AdWords lets us adjust bids based on demographics and user behavior at the ad grouplevel, which is an important part of optimizing campaigns. But we can’t adjust bids for those factors at the keyword level. Enter single keyword ad groups. Adjusting for demographics and behavior in SKAGs become a keyword-based bid adjustment when there’s only one keyword in the ad group.
4. Rankings, Costs
Each of these advantages—higher CTRs, better Quality Scores, more granular control—combine to earn higher ad placements and lower costs. Single-keyword ad groups are the best way to achieve all three at once and give your PPC campaign a leg up on competitors running less sophisticated campaigns.
Setting up SKAGs the easy way
If single-keyword ad groups are so great, why don’t more people use them? Most PPC marketers say they don’t have the time to create individual ad groups for campaigns with hundreds or thousands of keywords. The usual advice is to build them incrementally across your account. But that takes time—time that your ads aren’t reaching their max potential.
The easiest way to set up single-keyword ad groups is with the Keyword Lasso tool in Optmyzr. The Keyword Lasso automatically finds new keywords and implements them in a single-keyword ad group structure.
Step 1: Select the campaigns and date range you’d like the lasso to analyze. You can enable the Turbo Mode to remove the data threshold and see all the search terms that received traffic, even if some of them don’t have enough data for our system to identify them as statistically relevant.
Step 2: Define the strategy you’ll want to get recommendations on, and how the tool will filter the suggested keywords. You can choose to see recommendations based on search terms with the highest CTR, most conversions, or a custom metric like impression threshold or cost. You can also choose to see the top suggestions based on Optmyzr’s algorithm.
Step 3: Select the metrics you want to view in the Keyword Lasso report or search for specific suggestions if you have a high number of recommendations.
Step 4: Select the recommended keywords you want to create SKAGs for and pick their match type. Note that you can add the same keyword in multiple match types, and each match type will get its own ad group. You can also choose to add the suggestions as negative keywords.
Step 5: Select “Create SKAG” and choose campaign to put the SKAG in. You’ll be prompted to create an ad group name template, we suggest naming the ad groups by their keyword for simplicity. After hitting the “Apply” button, your recommended search terms are now uploaded as SKAGs!
Now that your SKAGs are live, you can run other One-Click Optimizations such as bid adjustments or A/B testing across your search, display and shopping campaigns.
Working with other structures
I’m a fan of the alpha-beta campaign structure coined by David Rodnitzky. The alpha-beta methodology uses broad match to discover top-performing keywords (the beta) and exact match campaigns to leverage them for maximum performance (the alpha). Alpha-beta and SKAG structures don’t compete with each other. In fact, SKAGs are a great strategy to implement within your alpha-beta campaigns.
Alpha-beta is a great way to gain insight on daily performance changes and optimize budget toward the alpha campaigns that generate conversions. Single-keyword ad groups work great in the alpha-beta structure because they isolate ad group and keyword performance. Often times, with multi-keyword ad groups, decisions are made at the ad group level without a clear understanding of what ads perform best with what keywords. SKAGs inject that clarity into the alpha-beta approach.
Wait…what about testing?
Testing is a vital part of AdWords success no matter how you structure your accounts. Having multiple ads to a/b test within an ad group won’t disrupt your SKAG strategy. It offers the same benefits a/b testing would offer if you had multiple keywords in one ad group.
The alignment between ads and keywords opens up other testing possibilities. We mentioned earlier that SKAGs let you make defacto keyword-level bid modifications for devices and locations. Both options can be tested with SKAGs, so you not only do the modification but test how they perform at the keyword level.
For PPC marketers starting a new paid search account, or looking to take their existing account to the next level, single-keyword ad groups offer a great path to success. They make it possible to achieve better alignment between ads and search queries, leading to higher Quality Scores and more opportunities to test and optimize.
Google has started automatically adding new ad variations to AdWords accounts. While I believe this will benefit the majority of advertisers who don’t manage their accounts very actively, this is a scary thought for the typical ad agency, or advanced PPC account manager who does a lot of controlled experimentation.
Right now only about 2,000 accounts are in the experiment and they’ve all been notified by email. If you want to check whether any of your accounts have already been added, or if you want to automate checking in the future, I wrote a new AdWords Script to help.
Simply grab the code and copy-and-paste it into the AdWords Scripts section of your MCC account. Here’s our help article on how to install an AdWords Script.
If you want to get an email if your account has active ads with the label “Added by AdWords”, add your email address in the line that says:
var EMAIL = “”;
Then schedule the script to run daily or weekly and get an email as soon as we detect there are automatically added ads in the account.
Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) from Google AdWords are now available for all advertisers to create. To help everyone who’s too busy to write thousands of new ads but who still wants to make the transition quickly we’ve just released a new free AdWords Script.
The script uses your landing pages’ meta tags to make suggestions for the new longer ad components. The title tag gets split into 2 lines of ad headlines and the meta description’s first 80 characters become the basis of the ad description line.
The script outputs a Google Sheet that can be imported into the AdWords Editor after you make any final tweaks to your ETAs.
Copy the code into your own AdWords account and give it a try:
Step-by-step for Using AdWords Scripts
If you’ve not worked with AdWords Scripts yet, this is a great way to get your feet wet. The script simply outputs a spreadsheet of data and makes no changes to your account so it’s a very low-risk way to try things out. Here is a quick step-by-step:
Copy the script code from the section above
Copy-and-paste it into the Bulk Operations > Scripts section of your AdWords account
put it into a child account and not in an MCC account
the code should completely replace any other code already in the script
Edit the text between lines 23 and 29 to customize the script
Authorize, Save, and finally Preview the script
Switch to the “Logs” view of the output and make sure the script ran successfully
Open the just-created Google Sheet and make final tweaks to the bulk sheet of expanded text ads
Go to the AdWords Editor and go to the menu for “Account” > “Import” and either import the data from a file or by copy-and-pasting
Do a final review of changes and apply the changes to your account.
Congrats! You just used AdWords Scripts to save yourself a ton of time…
Try Some Other AdWords Scripts
We have lots of other scripts to try and they’re all on our patent pending Enhanced Scripts™ platform so that the code will work equally well on MCC and child accounts, you can maintain multiple settings per account, easily maintain different settings different accounts, and most importantly, all without ever touching a single line of code. If you can copy-and-paste, you can use our Enhanced Scripts™ for AdWords.
A good account structure is still one of the most important aspects of managing an AdWords account. It makes it easy to manage different types of bid adjustments and track performance.
Keyword grouping is essential to a good account structure because it affects ad relevance and in turn Quality Score. Over the years account managers have come up with different methodologies to structure AdWords accounts. All these methodologies target a stronger keyword-ad relevance and a higher Quality Score. One such methodology is SKAG or Single Keyword Ad Group that is probably the utopia of keyword grouping. As the name suggests, each keyword has it’s own ad group which makes it possible to achieve a very high keyword-ad relevance. However, this is not always easy to do.
Optmyzr has automated routine processes like adding new keywords, pausing non-converting keywords as well as adding negatives through One-Click Optimizations™. One such optimization is the Keyword Lasso where our system recommends adding high performing search terms as keywords. This enables users to manage them better by setting bids and writing relevant ad text. Suggestions from the search terms report also bring out new keyword themes that require keywords to be put in individual ad groups.
New Keyword Lasso – With SKAG support
In the new version of the Keyword Lasso One-Click Optimization™we’ve added a feature that lets you create new ad groups from within Optmyzr. This feature can create ad groups using a template which enables automating methodologies like SKAG. It’s as easy as selecting a list of search terms and clicking a button to move them into individual ad groups.
Also, the tool automatically copies over all the ads from the ad group that triggered the search term. If search terms across multiple ad groups are being combined, it selects all the ads from the best performing ad group and uploads them to the new ad groups. It also sets bids for the search terms that are being added to be the same as the keywords they matched to. You can read more about the new Keyword Lasso and SKAG feature here.
70 characters for ad text, 25 characters for headline, and 35 characters for the display URL are all you get in AdWords to convey the message about your product or service. Although, success in AdWords depends a lot on your product and website, the first step is to get potential customers to your site by clicking on your ad. After you have worked out the structure of ad group themes, chosen relevant keywords, it is important that you do not overlook the ad copy. The ad copy must be informative and engaging at the same time. So, let’s see what it takes to write stellar ad copy!
Let’s start with this ad. This is a fine example of how an ad should be.
First, the headline should grab a user’s attention instantly and they should be aware of what you are offering
The first description line should induce interest
The second description line should convert that interest to the intended action
Finally, the display URL must take the user to the page where they can complete the intended action
Use keywords in the headline
Include keywords in your ad text without using any synonyms. If the keyword in the ad headline matches a user’s search query, it will appear in bold and make your ad stand out from the other ads on the page. It also helps establish a strong relation between your product/service and what the user is looking for which increases the likelihood of a user clicking on the ad.
Use numbers
Using numbers in ads creates a perfect block between long sentences, making them more visually appealing while adding specific information at the same time.
Including price points like ‘$49 only’ tells people what they are getting into and sets the right expectation. When you mention the price, it prevents people who have a fixed price in mind from clicking on the ad which saves unwanted clicks. Describing USPs like 100% custom made or 100% money-back guarantee helps establish credibility and trust and boosts the user’s confidence in your product/service.
Call to action
Having a call to action in the ad text is important. A call to action phrase tells users what they are supposed to do. For example, ‘Order Online Now’ tells the user that they can click on the ad and order the product instantly. If you’re offering a SaaS product, mentioning ‘Start Free Trial’ in the ad text tells users that they can try your product before buying it. Call now, order now, sign up, get a quote, buy now are some other call to action phrases that you can use. If you’re running a sale or have limited stock, using words like ‘Hurry’ induces a sense of urgency.
Good formatting
Always double-check your copy for typographical and grammatical errors. Running ads with errors affects credibility and doesn’t create a good impression. Another best practice is capitalizing the first letter of each word in your ad. This makes the ad copy look catchy. Look out for extra spaces, unclear URLs, and uneven capitalization.
Landing page
Now that you have written a great ad, it is time to create a great landing page experience for your users.
Make sure your landing page has content which is directly related to the ad text and keyword.
The website should be very easy to navigate and it shouldn’t take more than a few clicks to buy the product or complete the intended action.
Make sure landing pages load fast because customers don’t have patience and will leave your site.
Make sure you give enough information about the product on the landing page as it builds trust and makes it easier for users to make a decision.
The landing page directly impacts conversions, ad rank, and Quality Score.
Once you’ve created the right ads, make sure to test them on a regular basis. This is because performance data is the only measure of success. Optmyzr’s AB Testing for Ads Tool helps find ads that are underperforming and gives you the option to pause them with a single click. You can also create new ads to test.
I spend a lot of time talking and writing about the more humanistic elements of advertising; how to appeal to your audience in a unique and personal way, how to create a genuine connection with your visitors and so on and so forth. In our experience, there’s a lot to be said for these sorts of unquantifiable things that often get overlooked amongst the maelstrom of statistical analysis and data crunching.
Often times we need to make a judgment call that accounts for both our intuition and the immutable data our campaigns accrue.
That being said there are times when it’s important to sublimate our instinctual emotions and optimize our campaigns within the ruthlessly unforgiving framework of our historical data.
A/B split testing ad copy is one these instances.
Few, if any, of the standard optimization techniques we SEMs use will yield as consistent and predictable results as A/B split testing our ad copy. We can peel and stick keywords into new ad groups, restructure our account to work on our Quality Scores, readjust our custom bidding schedule with the hope of increasing our conversion rates – but they’re all inherently unpredictable to a certain extent. A/B split testing ad copy, when done right, will guarantee that your KPI of choice will increase (however incrementally) over time.
However, there are some important things to understand about A/B split testing ad copy that will spell the difference between your tests’ success or failure.
Setting yourself up for success in Adwords
Optmyzr provides by far the most advanced and efficient A/B split testing tools available to agencies and individual advertisers, but you need to make sure your AdWords campaigns are configured in a way that will help you run your split tests appropriately from within the Optmyzr dashboard.
By default, AdWords will optimize your ad rotation based on the ads expected to get the most clicks. This is great – if you’re lazy 🙂
If Google rotates your ads based on the ads expected to get the most clicks, you’ll generally see one or two of the ads in a given ad group getting the lion’s share of impressions and clicks. Naturally.
A/B split testing is all about getting statistically significant data across all the ads involved in any given test, so the first thing you need to do is change the ad rotation settings to rotate evenly. AdWords offers the option to rotate evenly for 90 days and then optimize, but since we’re going to be A/B split testing long after 90 days (right!?) we want to choose the “rotate indefinitely” option.
You can change this setting in the campaign setting tab. Keep in mind, since this is a setting modified at the campaign level, it will apply the rotation setting to all the ad groups in the campaign.
Developing your A/B Split Tests
Now that we’ve configured our ads to rotate evenly, we need to figure out what to test and how to test it. Based on how much data your account is generating you’re going to have to decide what type of split test you want to run.
People often confuse technical terminology, so we’ll begin by defining the difference between a multivariate (full factorial) test and an A/B test.
A/B split tests are the easiest to run and unless your landing pages are getting high volumes of daily traffic, an A/B split test is the method of choice (in my opinion at least). While many people think that A/B split testing is strictly for testing one individual variable, that’s not really the case. You can run 2 completely different ads against each other (or 3 or 4 for that matter), with different headlines, description text and display URLs, and still call it an A/B split test.
If you’re just measuring which ad performed the best, and not which individual variable performed the best, it’s an A/B test.
A multivariate test is when you seek to learn which individual variable performed the best. In other words, if you were testing 4 different variables (headline, description line 1, description line 2 and display URL), you would need to write 16 different ads (all possible combinations) in order to see which combination of variables worked the best. For most accounts, multivariate tests sound great in theory but don’t work so effectively in practice. In order to determine a winning ad, you need statistically significant data. Most accounts aren’t getting the kind of volume to make multivariate tests worth the time and effort.
So for our sake, let’s go back and talk a little more about A/B split tests.
I strongly recommend running single variable A/B split tests whenever possible (and let’s face it … it’s always possible). When you run 2 ads alongside each other testing just one variable, you know what element in the ad accounted for the better (or worse) performance.
For example, say you decided to run an A/B test on 2 different ad headline ideas. You’re a high end self-publishing company and you thought it may be a good idea to include your minimum order price in your ad headline to help dissuade people looking for cheap solutions from clicking on your ad. So you write two identical ads and only change the ad headline in one of them to include your minimum order price. When the statistically significant (more on that soon) results are in, you’ll know beyond the shadow of a doubt that it was the change in the ad headline that accounted for the difference in performance.
If for example you also changed the description lines of the ad to something other than the identical copy of the other ad in the ad group, you won’t know if it was the headline or the description or a combination of the two that accounted for the difference in performance.
Like we said, that would still be considered a valid A/B split test since we know one of the ads statistically outperformed the other ad, but we won’t know exactly which element of the ad should get the credit.
That being said, there are times a multivariable A/B split test is really useful. If you’re running a new ad group and you have two completely separate ideas that are thematically dissimilar, running two completely separate ads in an A/B test to determine which direction you should take for future tests could be a really useful strategy to use.
Let’s go back to our previous example of your high-end self-publishing company. You’re not sure whether highlighting the speed and quality of your service or the professionalism and experience of your editorial staff would make for a better ad. These are two separate ideas, and with the allotted ad space you can’t cover both aspects of the business. In this case, it may be a good idea to run a multivariable A/B test with one ad focusing primarily on the speed and quality and another ad focusing primarily on the editorial staff. You’re not testing any one variable like a headline, but rather a concept as a whole. Once your test determines which ad is more appealing (based on the KPI you choose to measure by – more on that soon) you can then dive into single variable A/B tests to further refine your copy and consistently increase performance.
For the sake of not getting stuck in a rut of stagnation and complacency, it’s always a good idea to periodically test new multivariable “concept” ads to try and find new ideas that you haven’t explored in the past.
Now that we know the sort of test we want to run, what do we actually test? You’ll probably get five different answers to this question if you ask five different people, so I’ll just tell you what we’ve found from the hundreds of accounts we’ve managed over the past few years.
Start with A/B testing ad headlines. When testing one variable like a headline, I generally aim to write four variations – which of course would give us four separate ads in an ad group. If you’re getting fewer than 75-100 clicks daily for any given ad group, consider writing 2-3 ads instead.
Your headline is not only the first element of your ad read by a user; it is often the only part of the ad that gets attention. If someone sees an ad headline they really like, they’ll often click the ad without reading the rest of what you have to say for yourself. Conversely, if the headline turns them off or isn’t precisely what they’re looking for, they’ll likely pass you on and move to the next ad on the page.
There’s a lot of information to swallow on a search engine results page, and people just don’t have the time or mental fortitude to read and analyze every line of every ad and organic result. It’s not something we advertisers like (after putting so much work into every character of our precious ads) but it’s the cold reality we have to eventually come to terms with. So in fewer words, test your headlines first. I hope most people would agree with that.
Following our logic, test your description lines of text next. Whether you test one line at a time or both lines of description text in one shot depends on your preference and the type of ad you’re writing (is there a distinct thought on each line or are both lines one long message?).
It’s a good idea to test your display URLs since the historical CTR of your display URLs plays a role in your Quality Score. Don’t expect to see dramatic results from an A/B test on display URLs (if there’s one part of your ad someone won’t read, it is the display URL), but test them anyway for the sake of Quality Score and for the sake of doing your job right.
What specifically to test is a longer discussion for another time but I try to always think of the products and services we’re advertising more in the context of their emotional benefits to the customer and less in the context of their features. Nobody buys a vacuum because they want a vacuum; they buy a vacuum because they want a clean room. We’ve seen some extraordinary A/B test results testing features VS. benefits (“bag-less and compact!” VS. “a home as clean as you after a long hot shower!”), and in almost every case, highlighting benefits and emotional payoffs always produce better results.
Also consider the idea of what I like to call qualifiers. Qualifying your clicks by including prices in your ads is one way of dissuading undesirable clicks from people whose traffic you don’t want to pay for.
A/B testing landing pages is also something that is highly effective, but with the advent of complex A/B landing page tools and software it has become an industry unto itself and need not conflict with your ad copy A/B split tests.
I’d be remiss to not mention the idea of testing your call to action. Of course, you have a call to action (right!?), and it’s a great idea to test different CTA’s to see which ones capture the attention of your audience the most effectively.
Now that we know how and what to test, let’s take a look at how we measure and define the results of our tests.
Statistical significance
If we didn’t have a tool like Optmyzr, the next few paragraphs would probably (definitely) bore you half to death. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather watch paint dry than talk, write or listen to anything that had to do with coefficients, correlations and the holy grail of statistical measurements – p values.
Luckily for all of us, Optmyzr does all that work for us. But just for the sake of our intellectual well-being, a quick word on p values.
In a statistical test, a p value tells us how significant, or scientifically interesting, our results are. We may find that headline A had a higher CTR than headline B, but how confident can we be that we’d see the same results if we ran the same test again? And again after that?
Our p values (also referred to as our confidence interval) tell us how confident we can be that we’d see the same results repeated, or in other words how reliable our findings were. A p value is just a number outputted by the statistical equations used to calculate the correlation between our variables, and depending on the field of study, different p values represent different thresholds of acceptability.
In the medical profession, when the results of a test can quite literally inform a surgeon on a life and death decision, a p value of less than .01 is required to determine reliability. For AdWords, a slightly less precarious area of study, we could assume that a p value of less than .05 is perfectly acceptable. In fact, in the social sciences p<.05 is the benchmark for reliability.
At this point you’re probably thinking if you never hear the words p value again it would be too soon. Amen to that, brother. I promise, it’s going to be lots of colorful pictures from here on out.
Since this isn’t a beginner’s Optmyzr tutorial, I’m going to assume basic working knowledge of the Optmyzr dashboard.
So we’ve configured and launched our split test, and now we want to see if we have enough statistically significant data to pick our winners.
Navigate over to the A/B testing for ads under the one click optimizations dropdown in Optmyzr.
Before we analyze our results, we’ll want to take a look at the settings Optmyzr allows us to configure.
Remember p values? That’s what OPTMYZR is referring to with Required Confidence. By default it’s set to 95% (p<.05) and that’s a good place for it to stay. You can also filter your results by Ad Type, Network, Minimum Impressions Per Ad and the Date Range.
The important option to look at here is the Parameter options list. As you can see from the first image, Optmyzr sets our parameter to CTR by default. This means that the statistical analysis will look at CTR as our key performance indicator of choice to determine the winning ad. As you can see from the green and red highlights in the CTR column, CTR is the metric being “studied” in this test.
You can also choose to run the A/B test results using conversion rate and conversions per impression as your metric of choice.
In order to determine which parameter you should use depends on the strategy behind the ad groups you’re testing ads in. If you’re running a broader, loosely targeted campaign to drive traffic to your site so you could build your remarketing audiences or your brand awareness, CTR may very well be the metric of choice for you. If your campaign is designed to drive profit and a positive ROI, then you may want to analyze your ad performance in the context of conversion rate.
Because the campaign we’re looking at here is a branding campaign, I care primarily about visitors to the site – so I’ll keep CTR as our metric of choice.
So for this A/B test we’re testing two different headlines. Based on a confidence level of 95%, Optmyzr outputs a winning ad using CTR as our metric of choice.
But can you spot something wrong?
The winning ad has a much higher volume of clicks and impressions as the losing ad. This is because the ads in this ad group were not set to rotate indefinitely and Google was giving preference to the ad expected to get more clicks. While the test results are still statistically significant, we want our data to be more equal when it comes to the volume of clicks and impressions.
Let’s hop over to another account to see what a proper A/B test should look like.
In this example, we ran a multivariable A/B test on two different overall ad concepts. Even though the winning ad still has quite a few more clicks than the loser, the losing ad has enough volume to lend real validity to the results of this test.
Notice another thing. Even though my parameter of choice over here is still CTR, Optmyzr graciously lets us know if another one of the metrics also matches up with statistical significance at our desired confidence interval. In this example, the winning ad also has a statistically significant higher Conversion per Impression rate than the losing ad. Good to know!
If you run into instances when one ad wins on CTR but loses on conversion rate, you need to seriously think about the campaign strategy and decide which metric to base your optimizations off of.
If you haven’t fallen in love with Optmyzr, you will now!
Not only does Optmyzr make it incredibly easy (and a little fun) to run AB split tests results across an entire account in one shot, Optmyzr also allows you to pause the losing ads from each split test with the click of a button.
By default, Optmyzr selects all the losing ads across all the ad groups and A/B tests that had statistically significant results within your defined parameters.
If you’re satisfied with the results, you can click the blue “Pause Selected Ads” button in the upper right hand corner and the losing ads will be paused inside your live AdWords account. Seriously, how cool is that?
But now that you’ve paused one of the ads, you want to write a new ad in its place so you could run another A/B test. Optmyzr has another incredibly useful tool that allows you to do just that without leaving the dashboard.
By clicking the “Create Ad” button in the upper right hand corner of an ad group’s section, Optmyzr presents you with a dialogue box that will allow you write a new ad and publish it live in the ad group you selected. Even cooler, Optmyzr gives you suggestions for each element of the text ad based on results from historical data and previous A/B tests run in the account.
As you can see, OPTMYZR offers a completely thorough solution to do A/B split testing in an easy, aesthetically simple and intuitive way.
The best way to get a sense of how it works is to just go in there and mess around with the different parameters. Once you get the hang of it, running what would otherwise have been complex analysis will take you a couple minutes.
Conclusion
A/B split testing ad copy gets overlooked even though it’s one of the most reliable and effective forms of optimization. Because of its inherent complexities and ambiguities, we sort of just gloss over it picking and choosing winning ad copy based more on our intuition than on statistically sound results.
Optmyzr’s A/B split testing tool really changes that for a lot of people by simplifying a complex task and making it incredibly easy and hassle-free to perform regularly and effectively.
Even though we rely heavily on statistical evidence with A/B tests, it’s crucial to express your creative voice and use your intuitive sense to determine what, where and how to test. By combining your unique personality and some good statistical analysis, you’ll be A/B testing like a pro.
Again, it’s easy to get complacent in a certain holding pattern with A/B tests, so remind yourself once every couple months (or weeks) to go back to the drawing board and test some new “concept” ads.
If you have any interesting data on A/B tests you’ve run in the past, I’d love to hear about them. Of course, any comments or questions are more than welcome (leave them below), and I’ll be sure to get back to you.
If you’ve made it all the way down here, I really appreciate you taking the time to read this post. Looking forward to next time …
Happy Testing!
Learn more about how I manage AdWords accounts at Adventure PPC.
Removing underperforming ads is one part of testing ad text in an AdWords account. The other part of the process is to create new ads so you can continue testing new ad copy. Optmyzr’s AB Testing For Ads optimization already lets you remove underperforming ads with one click. Creating ads in this optimization was a long standing request from our users and we’re happy to announce that this feature is now available!
You can now instantly create ads in ad groups from which you remove underperforming ads. What takes this feature to the next level is that the system automatically recommends high performing headlines, description lines and display URLs to choose from. This makes creating new ads efficient and easy.
Step 1
In the AB Testing for ads optimization, all ad groups that have underperforming ads are displayed. There is a button above the results to create ads in each ad group.
Step 2
Clicking on ‘Create Ad’ will open up an easy-to-use interface that will let you create ads in the ad group. When you click on each component (headline, description lines) of the ad, the system automatically shows you the best performing options. You can either choose from the options displayed or write your own text.
Step 3
Clicking on ‘Create Ad’ in the ad creation window will upload the ad instantly to your AdWords account. You’ll see a message that it has been successfully uploaded at the bottom of the window. In case there is an error and AdWords rejects the ad, the system will let you know that the ad was not uploaded. You can continue to create additional ad variations in the same window and upload the ads in your AdWords account.
Try out this feature in the AB Testing for Ads Optimization here.
AdWords gives you limited characters to get your message across in an ad. You want to use the characters available in the best possible manner. Very often, this means foregoing punctuation in the ad text. Earlier, it was not important to add punctuation in ad text because you were not following grammar rules. However, now it has become almost imperative to do so.
Google keeps trying new ways of showing ads in the top positions above the search results. Sometimes the description line 1 is moved up to show with the headline, sometimes Description line 2 is moved up to show with description line 1. In the first case, Google adds a hyphen between the headline and description line 1. However, in the second case it just moves the description line 2 up. So, if the description lines don’t have punctuation or conjunctions then it appears as one long sentence which doesn’t make sense to the user when they read it.
If the user doesn’t understand the text in your ad he/she will just move to the next ad. Your ad is showing in the most coveted position on the search page but you lose out because you didn’t use a full-stop or comma. In the long run, this will affect ad performance because the ad will accrue impressions but few clicks which means a low clickthrough rate (CTR).
Next time when writing ad text, don’t eliminate the comma or full-stop.
Display ads can be quite effective in building a brand and can be more engaging than text ads. You can either upload image ads you already have or, use the display ad builder to create display ads using templates. The display ad builder tool enables small businesses to create display ads without spending money on a designer. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just create a display ad from a text ad? Now you can in just three quick steps.
There is a feature in AdWords using which you can create display ads from existing text ads. The system uses the text in your ad and pulls images from your website to create display ads in all six sizes that you can show ads in. You have the option to edit almost all elements of the display ad like text, image, company logo, color. You also have the flexibility of editing the size of images and text boxes.
How to get started
1. Go to the ‘Ads’ tab and select the text ad you want to convert into a display ad
2. Click on ‘More Actions’ and select ‘Generate display ad’
3. You’ll see a number of display ad designs on your screen. Select one of them and click ‘Edit’. The edit option becomes visible once you hover or click on the ‘Select’ button for one of the display ad designs.
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4. After editing, click ‘Done’ and your display ads are ready.
The entire process takes less than five minutes and is very easy to follow! If you’ve been thinking of trying out display ads, this is a good way to test the waters.
It is an exciting time for search engine advertising as both Google and Bing embrace the potentials of Artificial Intelligence (AI). At Google’s annual IO event for developers, a new search experience was announced, featuring generative AI based on Google’s Lambda models.
The New Google Search Experience unveiled at Google I/O on May 10, 2023 integrates generative AI
Mirroring this, Microsoft’s Bing has been leveraging its ChatGPT integration for some time now.
So, what does this mean for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertisers?
In essence, the landscape remains largely familiar. Advertisers will continue to target keywords, manage bids, set budgets, and run campaigns. The key difference is that the ads will now appear not just on search results pages, but also alongside generative AI components.
Generative AI and PPC Advertising: A New Intersection
Bing has already shown how chat can seamlessly incorporate advertising. Upon user interaction with the chat, Bing translates the user’s prompt into a search keyword.
Bing shows users how their chats are turned into keywords which determine what ads might be shown
The same keyword, when entered into Bing chat and Bing search, yields similar ads, demonstrating a consistent user experience across modalities. The inclusion of ads in the chat experience is a novel way to engage with users and could potentially increase visibility and reach.
Ads in Bing’s chat experience
With Google’s recent announcement, this model is expected to find broader application. Ads are likely to start appearing alongside the AI chat experiences in the new search interface, although currently, there are no additional controls or settings for advertisers to specifically target or tweak this placement.
The Reporting Challenge and Future Prospects
One downside to the integration of generative AI with PPC advertising is the current lack of distinct reporting for ad performances next to the chat versus regular search experiences. This makes it challenging to evaluate the effectiveness of ads within these new interactive environments.
User interaction with ads on search results pages versus within AI chat experiences is an interesting area to watch. As both Google and Microsoft continue to fine-tune their chat-based solutions, there could be significant implications for how ads are displayed, targeted, and bid on.
Staying Ahead in the AI Era of PPC Advertising
At present, the best advice for advertisers is to immerse themselves in these new developments. Try out the new search experiences on Google and Bing, and explore firsthand what these changes look like. As we journey into this new era of PPC advertising, staying informed and adaptable will be key.
As these new technologies continue to evolve, we can expect further shifts and new opportunities in the PPC advertising landscape. Stay tuned for updates and insights as we navigate this exciting frontier. The AI revolution in search engine advertising has just begun, and it promises to be a fascinating journey ahead.
Should you pause your ads when products go out of stock? That was the question raised on Search Engine Land recently. I explained that as with any answer in PPC, it depends.
If you’re used to being in a top ad slot for a query, it’s worth defending your position by keeping ads on, even when the exact product the consumer searched for is temporarily unavailable.
If, on the other hand, you’re not usually the best match for what the user searched for, it’s fine to pause the ad to preserve the budget for your other conquests.
Sidenote: If you just want to pause ads for broken landing pages, or landing pages with text that indicates a product isn’t available, you can use our Broken URL Checker tool.
But if you want to do better, you can use our Campaign Automator solution. In this post, I will share the quickest and easiest way to use that tool to keep ads running all the time while automatically directing clicks to an alternative page on your site when a product goes out of stock.
Our solution can be managed completely by the person in charge of the Google Ads account and doesn’t require any technical assistance from your web development team.
Send users to a backup landing page when products are out of stock
Step 1: Create the Campaign Automator template for in-stock products
Connect your inventory data, like that in a Google Merchant Center feed, to Campaign Automator.
Then, set an inventory condition so that only products that are in stock will be processed by the template.
Now, create your template as you normally would with Campaign Automator. Add campaigns, ad groups, ads, extensions, keywords, bids, etc. Check out our help article for Campaign Automator if you’ve never done this before.
Because you’re going to take users to the specific landing page for the product they searched for, this template’s landing pages will use the product detail pages on your site.
Step 2: Duplicate the template you just created
To duplicate the template, use the hamburger menu to the right of your template name and select the option ‘Duplicate’.
Step 3: Change the inventory conditions and landing pages
Because you want this template to be used ONLY when the other template you just made is not used, you’ll have to swap the inventory conditions. So where before we said ‘Units in stock’ had to be greater than 0, now we should set a mutually exclusive condition, in this case: ‘Units in stock’ is equal to 0.
Finally, go to the ad group settings and change the landing pages. In this case we want the landing pages to be the product listing pages or category pages. So for example, if the user searched for a specific type of flatscreen TV which is out of stock, you can show them a page of similar TVs that are in stock.
Step 4: Automate both templates
To make sure consumers always have the best experience with your ads, it’s best to automate both Campaign Automator templates so that they will create, pause, and re-enable the right dynamically generated ads in your account as inventory conditions change.
Conclusion
Because the inventory conditions you’ve set up in your two new Campaign Automator templates are opposites, only one condition can be true at a time so only one of the two templates will enable an ad at any time.
This means that you will always have an ad for all your selected keywords, but when the keyword is for an in-stock product, it will lead users to the product detail page where they can purchase exactly what they wanted, whereas if the product is out of stock, they will be presented with great alternatives and perhaps still make a purchase from your site.
If you don’t subscribe to Campaign Automator, let us know and we’ll be happy to show you all it can do to make your PPC ads more effective.
Moving a step closer to near-total PPC automation, Google Ads announced that starting from July 2022, Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) will be the only search ad type in standard search campaigns.
Starting June 30, 2022, responsive search ads will be the only Search ad type that can be created or edited in standard Search campaigns. (Existing expanded text ads will still serve.)
Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) are comfortable and offer more control over what ad text you want to show to your audience. But Responsive Search Ads do improve ad performance when combined with human optimization and creativity.
Since none of us can force Google to roll back their announcement, the best thing to do is adapt to RSAs.
Here’s how Optmyzr can help you build good Responsive Search Ads.
How Optmyzr helps you craft high-quality Responsive Search Ads
We’ve been handing PPC experts control of their advertising destiny for a while, so it’s no surprise that the Optmyzr platform comes with several tools to manage and optimize Responsive Search Ads. Here are some of the things you can do.
1. Find winning components in the Ad Text Optimization tool
The Ad Text Optimization tool lets you find the best-performing headlines, descriptions, and other components from your current text ads. Use these winning components in the next step to craft RSAs using ad text that’s been proven to win you clicks and conversions.
We’re working on adding Responsive Search Ad support for the Ad Text Optimization tool so you can start tracking the performance of your RSAs more closely.
2. Create new RSAs in the Responsive Search Ads Utility
Our Responsive Search Ads Utility is an easy solution to create RSAs in your ad groups that don’t currently have any. It offers suggestions for headlines and descriptions, making the process faster and easier.
Use the winning ad text components from your ETAs here, but be sure to account for the RSA behavior of mixing and matching headlines and descriptions. You’ll want to tweak your ad text so that each component can stand on its own as well as be part of a larger message.
If your advertising vertical demands that you pin certain messages, now’s the time to do that. Even otherwise, you can pin minimally if something really demands to be seen in a certain position. Just don’t go overboard.
Watch our latest walkthrough of the Responsive Search Ads Utility:
And learn more about how to create RSAs using Optmyzr here.
3. Find and fix underperforming Responsive Search Ads
Most search ads that run on Google are poorly crafted, which is why even a basic copywriting effort will usually lead to good performance. But when you have up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, a Responsive Search Ad containing weak ad text tends to underperform on an even larger scale.
Fortunately, we created a handy RSA guide a while back. In it, you’ll find information on how to create a good Responsive Search Ad, how to improve your RSA ad strength, and how to audit and fix underperforming RSAs using Optmyzr.
The audit section, which is usually one of the more challenging parts, is easier thanks to our rule-based (if x, then y) strategy that you can run and automate using our powerful Rule Engine.
So what now for PPC pros who rely on Expanded Text Ads?
Expanded Text Ads are comfortable, reliable, and offer you more control over what messages get shown when. Responsive Search Ads can improve performance when combined with human optimization and creativity.
The best solution is to use both, but since we can’t force Google to roll back their announcement, the next best thing is to use the 10-month runway ahead of us to adapt.
Building good RSAs takes time and patience, so don’t give up. Test, test, and then test some more. All great campaigns are built on exhaustive experimentation!
Over the past two weeks, we’ve looked at two core facets of any search campaign: writing ad text that’s designed to convert, and diversifying ad types to attract a wider audience.
This week, I want to discuss the third part of the process: optimizing your campaigns to improve their performance.
As every PPC marketer knows, taking a campaign live is when the testing and learning really begin. Using the insights that follow is how you develop a strong foundation into a memorable, profitable campaign.
Let’s take a look at 5 ways you can optimize existing campaigns to drive additional traffic and better conversions.
1. Understand the point of testing
Imagine you’re in a mall shopping for clothes. What makes you decide to enter a store? Is it the window display? That big sale with 50% discounts? Points or cashback on your credit card?
The store won’t know until they ask; testing and identifying what really helps. Your PPC campaigns work in a similar way.
You could have drafted the best ad copy ever — proposing value, mentioning promotions. But until you test it in a way designed to provide answers, you won’t know if the ad text works or which parts are most enticing to users.
2. Pause ads that aren’t converting
Performance metrics like click-through rate, conversion rate, and conversions to impressions served can help you identify if your ads resonate with users. After your ads have served for enough time or won enough impressions, you can begin testing them.
Traffic for each ad group will vary, which is why testing ads is a continuous process. This ensures that as soon as some of your ad groups have served the right amount of traffic, you can:
Test ad groups with significant performance data
Test ads with a similar number of impressions to find a winner
PPC expert and long-time Optmyzr customer Isaac Rudansky shared his best practices in this blog, explaining how Optmyzr can help you test your ads more effectively.
3. Turn winners into champions
The next step is to test your ad components to find messaging that works the best across your campaigns. Some cool ways to manage ad content better include:
Find high-performing headlines or descriptions from specific campaigns to create appealing Responsive Search Ads.
Find ad components that are used less frequently but perform well. Use that text to create new ads that replace low-performing ones.
Find ad text that’s being used too frequently, and create new variations to test further.
4. Keep seasonality in mind
As important as it is to keep updating your ad text and content, it’s equally vital to keep updating any seasonal offers.
For example, running Christmas ads weeks after the season ends is a fundamental advertising blunder. Avoid mistakes like this by running audits of ad text and replacing these out-of-date ads with new content.
As an aside, you can also use the Rule Engine in Optmyzr to automatically pause campaigns based on seasonality or holiday timing. Find out more about that here.
5. Enhance existing campaigns
There’s always a way to add a new edge to your ads, whether it’s through components you haven’t used or a change in strategy. Here are some ways to take your campaigns to the next level:
Leverage ad extensions (use at least 3 types).
Test your landing pages to find which URLs perform best.
Find new ad group themes and make them more query-focused.
Implement SKAGs (single keyword ad groups) for keywords with low Quality Score to build ads specific to each keyword.
Conclusion
When it comes to optimization, testing is the most important component. Until your ads have served long enough to get some strong data behind them, it can be difficult to gauge just what is and isn’t working.
The further you get along this journey, the quicker and more scalable your optimization needs to be. If you’d like to see how Optmyzr can make this experience more seamless, you can try our platform completely free for 14 days — no credit card required!
If you have any other questions, write to us at support@optmyzr.com and we’ll be happy to start a conversation!
In last week’s post, we talked about why it’s important to take the time to write ads that resonate with your target audience — and to update them periodically.
So you’ve written some ads and they’re performing well. How do you take it to the next level and move the performance needle?
This week, I’ll show you how your client or business can benefit from experimenting with different ad types on the Search network.
What ad types can drive the results you want?
The amount of diversity within Google’s selection of Search ads is considerable, and different ad types are better suited to different business goals. Today, I want to talk about three of the more popular choices if you’re just getting into writing PPC ads.
1. Dynamic Search Ads
Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) according to Google:
Dynamic Search Ads are the easiest way to find customers searching on Google for precisely what you offer. Ideal for advertisers with a well-developed website or a large inventory, Dynamic Search Ads use your website content to target your ads and can help fill in the gaps of your keyword based campaigns.
When you run a DSA, Google uses structured website data to automatically create headlines and descriptions, and links landing pages that match user queries to your ad.
While a DSA might not offer the control and flexibility to customize or edit ad text, it’s the ideal way to get started with new PPC accounts — provided you have the web content and landing pages to support it.
Once Google starts generating DSAs, keep a close eye on their performance. You can use the best-performing headlines and descriptions in targeted Search ads or other types of specialty ads.
2. Expanded Text Ads
Expanded Text Ads (DSA) according to Google:
Expanded text ads are similar to the text ads that you’re used to, but with a few key differences:
Expanded text ads have three headline fields… the third is optional.
Expanded text ads also have two 90-character description fields.
The domain of your display URL is based on your final URL domain.
The display URL can include two optional “Path” fields.
Expanded text ads are mobile-optimized.
Running an ETA is entrusting Google’s machine learning to figure out what works best for your business. All you do is enter a combination of different text elements — make sure these aren’t just variants of the same message, but distinctly different value propositions and calls to action.
My recommendation is to create three or four ETAs using combinations of distinct headlines and descriptions within one ad group. Once these ads start performing, you can run additional tests to identify which ad copy yields better CTRs or conversion rates
And while you test your ads, you can also create variations of them to drive better performance. Some of the advantages of ETAs include being able to:
Retain control of ad text
Enjoy the freedom to be creative
Promote value or offers as individually themed ad groups
Set different campaign goals for each ad group
Add keywords to ad text to improve CTR
3. Responsive Search Ads
Responsive Search Ads (DSA) according to Google:
Responsive search ads let you create an ad that adapts to show more text — and more relevant messages — to your customers. Enter multiple headlines and descriptions when creating a responsive search ad, and over time, Google Ads will automatically test different combinations and learn which combinations perform best.
RSAs allow you to expand your reach to show on inventories you might be missing with ETAs (quality score and bids).
Choose this ad type if you’d like to rely on Google’s disruptive methodology to find the right combinations of headlines and descriptions from the options provided to show ads created to respond to specific user queries.
When running an RSA, make sure that:
The different headlines and descriptions don’t contain repetitive content related to price or promotions, so that all the text chosen in the ads are unique.
Each headline and description is complete in itself, so that the ad text pieced together by Google makes sense.
Remember that you can only have up to three RSAs in one ad group, and Google recommends running at least one in each.
The million-dollar question: All for one, or one for all?
Once your account is up and running, a combination of RSAs and ETAs can help you strike a balance between controlling your ad text and exploring new opportunities to show your ads.
While you set up these ad types, remember to create variations of ETAs — as well as the headlines and descriptions of RSAs — while keeping in mind the traffic you expect your ad group to serve:
Low-Traffic Ad Group (under 5,000 impressions every 30 days): Two ETAs and one RSA with four to six headlines and two to three descriptions
Medium-Traffic Ad Group (5,000 to 15,000 impressions every 30 days): Three ETAs and one RSA with eight to ten headlines and three to four descriptions
High-Traffic Ad Group (15,000+ impressions every 30 days): Three to five ETAs and two RSAs with different variations of four to six headlines and two to three descriptions per ad
This approach to ad creation should allow for earlier identification of winners — for Google to find better-performing headlines and descriptions, and to identify the better-performing ads based on A/B testing.
Conclusion
As always, keep a close eye on your campaigns — especially in the early stages of using a new ad type. You might discover something that affects ad performance that can be sorted out quickly.
A tool like Optmyzr can be of use. The Ad Text Optimization tool lets you import existing campaign data to find your best performing headlines and descriptions (with tracking templates), and we also have a feature that can help you build RSAs within our platform.
In the next blog post, I’ll show you how to optimize your ads and ad text to drive even better results. In the meantime, you might want to look at Google’s resource directory for ads and campaigns to better understand these (and other) ad types.
Across this three-part search ad masterclass, I’ll share insights I’ve picked up from working with some of the world’s most successful PPC strategists.
Insights that will help you:
Create and optimize successful ad text
Decide which types of ads will get you the best results
Identify what works and what doesn’t — and double down on the former
Let’s kick things off with how you can write ads designed to win high-quality clicks that are actually relevant to your business.
Why relevant ad text drives clicks
Think of your PPC campaign’s ads as the window displays in a store, which are often a shopper’s first point of engagement. All your hard work winning an ad auction could be nothing more than an empty time-sink if your ads aren’t written to get clicks from people who want your product or service.
And despite all the automation implemented by Google, writing ads that get clicks still relies on the creativity of account managers.
Just as store displays are changed frequently to continue attracting traffic, so too is it important to keep updating PPC ads with fresh promotions — always while highlighting your value proposition.
A regular refresh to ad text that keeps up with industry trends frequently improves the chances of getting relevant clicks on your ads.
How to write ad text like a winner
The image below shows ad results for the search term “buy women shoes”. The ad in first position is a great example of how to utilize the space provided by Google to promote value proposition via ad extensions and promotions.
Even if this ad had only won second position, I would still be very likely to click on it:
It’s hyper-relevant to my search.
The offer is highlighted clearly.
I know exactly where to find them.
A quick glance at the two ads placed lower reveal flaws that might have intrigued a click if they:
Used ad text that resonates better with my query
Highlighted unique value points and accessory benefits
Added promotions, discounts, or factors to build user trust
Taking ad text to the next level
Along with ad text that’s relevant to a user’s search, another aspect of your ads that can make a difference to performance is which ad type you select.
Google offers multiple ad types to help you advertise in a way that’ll help you achieve your PPC goals. If we’re sticking with Search ads, there are two highly popular ad types you can run in addition to regular search ads.
Expanded Text Ads are popular with PPC strategists working across industries. Expanded Text Ads let you create an ad with three static headlines and two descriptions. It offers ample space to convey your company’s value proposition, and those of the products and services being advertised.
Responsive Search Ads are a type of ad that automates the process of A/B testing. Google allows you to define up to 15 headlines and four descriptions, and A/B testing is automated. Google’s machines experiment to find the combination of headlines and description that are predicted to work best for specific user queries.
Conclusion
If you’re advertising on Google’s Search network, your ad text and choice of ad type play crucial roles in the performance of your campaigns — for both Expanded Text Ads and Responsive Search Ads.
Creating search campaigns that get quality clicks is as simple as this four-step process:
Select ad types intelligently.
Write relevant ad text that highlights value.
Create well-structured ad group themes.
Refresh your ads periodically.
Once you start seeing results from your campaigns and need support managing them at scale, a tool like Optmyzr can help you make bulk ad text changes across all your campaigns in just a few clicks. Next week in part 2 of this series, we’ll further explore these ad types — plus one more that might get you additional results. In the meantime, check out this support article from Google for more amazing tips to help you write successful ads.
Copywriting is one of the most versatile tools in a PPC marketer’s skill set for a reason. After all, words are the foundational building block of most channels, including paid search advertising.
But all the data in the world means precious little if you can’t craft messaging that drives conversions.
Today, we’re talking about our Ad Text Optimization tool and how it helps PPC marketers deliver ads with copy that works during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here are five things it can help you achieve for your businesses and clients.
1. Let people know about operating changes.
This pandemic has forced businesses to rethink the way they operate. Government-enforced social distancing restrictions limit the number of people who can be in a store at once. On top of this, many employers have implemented new policies to limit their staff’s exposure to potential carriers of the virus.
With the Ad Text Optimization tool, you can make bulk edits to your ads that reflect any new operating conditions so that consumers know what to expect when they do business with you.
Use Cases
• Announce a full switch to curbside pickup for a big box retailer.
• Advertise a restaurant or cafe’s switch from dine-in to takeout only.
• Inform consumers of timings adjustments for stores normally open 24 hours.
2. Tell people about your new product experience.
For some verticals, there’s just no way around giving people a chance to see, touch, and feel the product. In other cases, the product is an experience. Either way, prevailing conditions demand that businesses get creative about providing this interaction in a safe environment.
The Ad Text Optimization Tool lets advertisers make sweeping changes to their campaigns to let consumers know about changes to methods of delivery, product experience, and more.
Use Cases
• Offer test drives at the customer’s doorstep instead of having to visit a dealership.
• Advertise mobile mini-shops with core hardware and home improvement SKUs.
• Announce a shift to virtual delivery for experiential services like yoga classes.
3. Keep up with implementation and easing of restrictions.
While much of the US, UK, and Europe are already sheltering in place, things are changing as we learn more about COVID-19. Local, state, and federal regulations are likely to be modified regularly as governments make new discoveries and observe medical data.
Whether you need to make regular updates, create new ads, or manage ads for multiple locations, the Ad Text Optimization tool gives you the power to create ads that are more likely to perform.
Use Cases
• Restart advertising for a non-essential business exiting regional lockdown.
• Publish in-store social distancing regulations for a barbershop.
• Announce geo-based store openings and closures for a franchise brand.
4. Be sensitive to prevailing conditions.
One of the biggest challenges for advertisers is making sure ads don’t come across as insensitive or tone deaf. Many phrases that are perfectly acceptable in a non-pandemic environment can be questionable when deployed today.
It can be difficult to manually track all these phrases across your campaigns and ads. The Ad Text Optimization Tool lets you search for and replace them in just a few clicks.
Use Cases
• Replace phrases like ‘go viral’ or ‘breathtaking’ when advertising your product.
• Avoid otherwise-appropriate words like ‘happy’ or ‘delighted’.
• Insert phraseology to discourage hoarding or advertise seniors-only windows.
5. Get new insights more quickly, and act on them.
It’s not just the markets that are volatile right now. Consumer sentiment is changing rapidly based on new developments — that includes search behavior. One of Google’s tips for account managers is to plan weekly, rather than monthly or quarterly.
To make weekly planning feasible, you need data on how your ad text influenced performance. The Ad Text Optimization tool lets you compare ads side by side with metrics including CTR, conversions, impressions, and more.
Use Cases
• Compare ads offering delivery and pickup to see which one performed better.
• Help a brick and mortar produce store quickly build accounts and start running ads.
• Scale the acquisition and application of new insights across multiple accounts.
Less time. Fewer mistakes. Better results.
The Ad Text Optimization tool significantly reduces the time and energy cost of making copy edits across your ads and campaigns. And it makes the exact same edit you want wherever it occurs — no gaps, no missed instances.
To learn more about this tool and its different features, check out our user guide. The Optmyzr team is also working from home, ready and available to help PPC professionals deliver value for their businesses and clients during this challenging time.
There’s nothing as terrifying as doing something no one has ever done before. And yet, that’s the boat we all find ourselves in.
COVID-19 is mankind’s first major tryst with the unknown in a long time, which means there are no roadmaps or strategies to get through this. We’re all wandering down this same new path together.
From healthcare to advertising, no industry is immune to the challenges this presents. While doctors don’t yet fully know how to treat patients, marketers remain unsure of how to respond to different situations. There’s no data to pull, no machine learning to lean on, no lessons from the past that apply directly.
All we can do is trust our instincts.
Advertisers can use the downtime to streamline complex processes
So it’s reassuring to see that the first reaction of most marketers and brands right now is to do the right thing. Take a look through the news or your LinkedIn feed, and chances are you’ll quickly come across a global CEO or small business owner who’s shifted focus from profit margins to supporting their people, communities, healthcare professionals, and frontline workers.
Rising to the challenge: Rallying the PPC community
With behaviors changing across the spectrum, PPC professionals and brands everywhere are trying to solve problems for which there is no historical data. This is where the PPC community needs to deploy that extra bit of creativity — treating the situation with seasonality, studying Google Trends to inform countermeasures and, most importantly, sharing our learnings with each other.
In a piece for SearchEngineLand titled “Paid search ad copy strategies during coronavirus”, Ginny Marvin shares with marketers three core approaches to writing effective, meaningful, and mindful ads during the ongoing pandemic.
“If there’s one thing this crisis has shown, it’s the ingenuity of businesses to rethink entire processes and business models,” she writes. “Be sure your ad copy reflects how your company is responding to this new environment.”
Are you communicating how your brand is adapting to the ‘new normal’?
Of course, it’s not just marketers who are sharing new ‘best practices’ for these uncharted waters. Google has chipped in with a handy help document full of great advice on how to approach your PPC advertising campaigns during COVID-19.
Takeaways from Google’s campaign tips for COVID-19… and How Optmyzr can help
Google also provides tips on adapting to dynamic market conditions
1. The words you choose matter. Right now, words that would otherwise be perfectly fine to use might not have the context you want them to. Terms like “checkup” or “protection” are just two of the many that Google recommends being careful with, but they also advise marketers to be cognizant of regional terminology that may be in use.
Bulk adjust ad copy to be more mindful of the current situation in your markets
2. Stay on top of logistics and inventory. With supply chains heavily disrupted, the last thing you want is for customers to place orders that can’t be fulfilled. Google suggests editing ads to make sure you account for operational realities like timings, delivery, and in-store pickup.
Tip: TheCampaign Buildercan help you automate your ads based on business data like which products are in stock and which are on back-order.
Automate shopping ads to be more accurate and up-to-date
3. Review, review, review. Every aspect of your communication matters; not just your copy. To quote Google, this includes “images and videos that show large gatherings of people or human interaction, the tone of your headlines, descriptions, and landing pages.”
4. Stay aware. Google recommends keeping track of the pulse in your areas of business via their Trends page to better understand how your customers think, feel, and act at this time. This will help you better communicate in a way that will be well-received.
Tip: Check out Optmyzr’s newCOVID-19 PPC Analysis Tool, which annotates PPC charts with dates when local and federal governments enacted restrictions like shelter-in-place or store closures.
Get granular insights by adjusting metrics and geographies for different campaigns
5. Remain flexible. Above all, Google’s help document highlights the importance of being able to pause and pivot with agility. Conversion rates might call for adjustments to your bids, and ad groups or campaigns for high-demand products might need to be paused quickly when you run out of stock.
Use the Non-Converting Search Queries recipe to weed out low-converters
Doing the right thing in unfamiliar times
While the sudden appearance of COVID-19 has put businesses into vastly different situations, there is more that unites us. Now more than ever, it’s paramount that we all do the right thing.
If your business is able to continue spending marketing dollars, we encourage you to plan initiatives that support healthcare professionals, frontline workers, and vulnerable people. Be mindful of the words and images you select for blog posts, landing pages, search and display ads, and e-commerce listings.
If you’re experiencing a lull, leverage the downtime to improve your relationships with internal and external stakeholders. Reconnect with your employees, build backup plans for the brands you nurture, and develop flexible processes to quickly scale up to usual levels of spend when the storm passes.
In the meantime, we’re here to help soften the blow for our customers and the PPC industry as best we can. Let us know if we can help. Our team is working from home and ready to continue delivering great support.
Optimizing your bids and budgets is most definitely an important part of successful account management, however, even great bids with a precise budget can perform negatively if the ad’s text doesn’t really catch any attention.
To better manage your ads from every angle, we have created a tremendously powerful tool that’ll help you analyze not only the text contained in your headlines and descriptions but also how they work in line with each other: Ad Text Optimization.
What does the Ad Text Optimization tool do?
Optmyzr’s Ad Text Optimization tool helps you break down and review your ads’ performance by its components. You can view data by Headline 1, Headline 2, Headline 3 (where available), Description 1, Description 2, the full ad, Path 1, Path 2, the combination of Path 1 with Path 2, and Headline 1, 2, and 3 together.
In the following example, you can see the performance of this ad as a whole, with 151 clicks and a CTR of 20.60%
But when we break it down by parts you can see how each component works on its own:
Headline 1:
Headline 2:
Description 1:
Headline 1 & 2 combined:
Why this is important
By analyzing the text contained in your ads, you can get a better sense of what works, and what doesn’t. Keep in mind that an overall good ad can still be negatively influenced by a low performing component within – even if the rest work well!
We are used to investing the most time in making sure the budget is allocated in an optimal way, the CTR is high, and the conversions are high quality, but sometimes we forget what makes a person click on an ad, and that is the message contained in the text. With the new insights you’ll derive from the new Ad Text Optimization tool, we hope to make you a more effective digital marketer.
No time wasted – Make bulk changes!
Another great feature inside this tool is the Find-and-Replace option, which allows you to make bulk changes to ad components. This feature can be used in several ways, for example, to replace the word(s) in individual ad components, several ad components, or anywhere it’s found in any ad text component. You can also choose whether you want to create new ads or update existing ones with your change.
For example, say some of your ads contain “2019” in their headline or description text, but the year is coming to an end, so you want to start promoting services for 2020. Instead of going through every ad in your account, with the Ad Text Optimization tool you can simply go to the Find and Replace feature and tell it to replace every text in any component of your existing ads that have “2019”, with “2020”.
You could also use the tool to quickly start new A/B tests for ads. For example, you could create new versions of all ads with the text ‘free trial’ but try the variation ‘try it free’. Starting this test takes just seconds with the new tool and after some data has started to accrue, you can use our existing AB Testing for Ads tool to find winners, and remove losers.
As easy as 1, 2, 3!
Stay tuned for more of our awesome tools and features!
Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) were announced by Google Ads last year and are now available for all advertisers globally. This new ad format allows you to enter up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, all of which should work together to produce a compelling ad.
Responsive Search Ads
If you’ve been holding off on adding RSAs to all your ad groups because the process of coming up with 15 great headlines and 4 descriptions is too time-consuming, Optmyzr has a great time-saving tool to help. It suggests ad text components from your existing expanded text ads and allows quick edits across entire campaigns. This post will show you how the RSA Builder from Optmyzr can help you quickly deploy RSAs across all the accounts and campaigns you manage.
What are Responsive Search Ads
For this new ad format, Google Ads’ system uses machine learning (ML) to put together the best combination of headlines and descriptions, taken from the ad text components you’ve provided. By having multiple headlines and descriptions to work with, your ad’s message can be better tailored to each user’s unique query, thereby reaching more potential customers.
This Responsive Search Ad format also adapts very well to different devices and has the potential to increase the overall ad group performance.
At Optmyzr we’re committed to making PPC account management as simple and hassle-free as possible, so to help with this new ad format, we created the Responsive Search Ad Builder, which works by gathering the ad components from your current expanded text ads and using them to generate suggestions for the headlines and descriptions that’ll be contained in your new Responsive Search Ads.
The way it works is straightforward, you’ll first choose the campaign to work on, and which source we should use to suggest new ad text components. You’ll also see the option to add more headlines and/or descriptions (up to 15H and 4D) and modify the path 1 & 2, and the final URL. As always, nothing will be created or uploaded without your final approval.
One of the great benefits of our tool is that you can approve all new RSAs at once or review them one by one, and then upload them in bulk directly to your Google Ads account.
Responsive Search Ads are a great way to display more relevant ads and improve your reach to more prospective customers, by helping you compete in more auctions that would otherwise require creating multiple ads. We explained the incremental nature of RSAs in our monthly column on Search Engine Land.
How to create RSAs with Optmyzr
To get started you’ll be selecting the campaign to work on, and how we’ll be suggesting new ad text components. This can be either from all active ads in the campaign or all active ads within the same ad group, the latter being the most common and recommended option.
Once you’ve selected which settings to use, you’ll go straight into the tool where you’ll have all the ad groups displayed to the left side and all the ad components towards the right side. The ad groups marked with orange have not been reviewed, and therefore no changes will be made. Once you edit, review and approve the changes, they will turn to green, which means they’ll be added to the list of RSAs to be uploaded.
The suggestions showed for headlines and descriptions can be modified for only that ad group, of for every ad group which is using that piece of text. This makes a great way for bulk edit and creation of RSAs. Likewise, you can add a new headline or description and in the same way use it only for that ad group, or for all ad groups.
Once you’ve edited and approved the ads you want to upload, simply press on “Review and Upload Approved Ads” and you’ll see a final summary of what will be created. From then, and with your approval, your changes will go live in Google Ads.
Optmyzr’s Responsive Search Ads Builder is a great way of making bulk modifications and RSA creation across your campaigns. It’s time-saving, simple to use and very convenient, as it would otherwise take much longer to do this process one by one.
Single keyword ad groups—or SKAGs—are an AdWords strategy that puts one keyword in each of your campaign’s ad groups. SKAGs give PPC marketers more control over raising click-through rates, managing bids, and achieving high Quality Scores.
Yet many AdWords accounts are built to match a company’s website structure with as many as 20 keywords per ad group. Why aren’t SKAGs more mainstream? Google doesn’t expressly advocate them, so it’s not a strategy people encounter when they first learn AdWords. In fact, the 20 keyword per ad group guidance comes from Google itself.
That advice can point new PPC marketers in a direction that denies them the benefits of single keyword ad groups. In this post, we’ll lay out those benefits and the fastest way to build SKAGs we developed here at Optmyzr.
Main Advantages of Single Keyword Ad Groups
Higher CTRs
Better Quality Scores.
Easier bid management.
Higher rankings, lower costs.
Let’s look more closely at how SKAGs create each benefit.
1. Click-Through Rates
We know ads matching search queries are more likely to earn the clicks that drive PPC performance. Multi-keyword ad groups make that alignment less likely because one ad can show for multiple keywords. The more that happens, the more clicks you risk losing by having less relevant ads. A single-keyword ad group structure ensures you serve ads precisely matching what a searcher wants to find, especially when using SKAGs and exact match, making your ad more relevant and more likely to get clicks.
2. Quality Scores
Quality Score is Google’s way of showing how well your ad performs in the AdWords auction. Quality Scores are based on your landing page experience, how relevant your ad is, and how likely it is to earn clicks. SKAGs directly make ads more relevant to keywords, which in turn gives them a higher expected click-through rate. Both signals tell AdWords you’ve got a great ad that deserves a higher Quality Score.
3. Bid management
AdWords lets us adjust bids based on demographics and user behavior at the ad grouplevel, which is an important part of optimizing campaigns. But we can’t adjust bids for those factors at the keyword level. Enter single keyword ad groups. Adjusting for demographics and behavior in SKAGs become a keyword-based bid adjustment when there’s only one keyword in the ad group.
4. Rankings, Costs
Each of these advantages—higher CTRs, better Quality Scores, more granular control—combine to earn higher ad placements and lower costs. Single-keyword ad groups are the best way to achieve all three at once and give your PPC campaign a leg up on competitors running less sophisticated campaigns.
Setting up SKAGs the easy way
If single-keyword ad groups are so great, why don’t more people use them? Most PPC marketers say they don’t have the time to create individual ad groups for campaigns with hundreds or thousands of keywords. The usual advice is to build them incrementally across your account. But that takes time—time that your ads aren’t reaching their max potential.
The easiest way to set up single-keyword ad groups is with the Keyword Lasso tool in Optmyzr. The Keyword Lasso automatically finds new keywords and implements them in a single-keyword ad group structure.
Step 1: Select the campaigns and date range you’d like the lasso to analyze. You can enable the Turbo Mode to remove the data threshold and see all the search terms that received traffic, even if some of them don’t have enough data for our system to identify them as statistically relevant.
Step 2: Define the strategy you’ll want to get recommendations on, and how the tool will filter the suggested keywords. You can choose to see recommendations based on search terms with the highest CTR, most conversions, or a custom metric like impression threshold or cost. You can also choose to see the top suggestions based on Optmyzr’s algorithm.
Step 3: Select the metrics you want to view in the Keyword Lasso report or search for specific suggestions if you have a high number of recommendations.
Step 4: Select the recommended keywords you want to create SKAGs for and pick their match type. Note that you can add the same keyword in multiple match types, and each match type will get its own ad group. You can also choose to add the suggestions as negative keywords.
Step 5: Select “Create SKAG” and choose campaign to put the SKAG in. You’ll be prompted to create an ad group name template, we suggest naming the ad groups by their keyword for simplicity. After hitting the “Apply” button, your recommended search terms are now uploaded as SKAGs!
Now that your SKAGs are live, you can run other One-Click Optimizations such as bid adjustments or A/B testing across your search, display and shopping campaigns.
Working with other structures
I’m a fan of the alpha-beta campaign structure coined by David Rodnitzky. The alpha-beta methodology uses broad match to discover top-performing keywords (the beta) and exact match campaigns to leverage them for maximum performance (the alpha). Alpha-beta and SKAG structures don’t compete with each other. In fact, SKAGs are a great strategy to implement within your alpha-beta campaigns.
Alpha-beta is a great way to gain insight on daily performance changes and optimize budget toward the alpha campaigns that generate conversions. Single-keyword ad groups work great in the alpha-beta structure because they isolate ad group and keyword performance. Often times, with multi-keyword ad groups, decisions are made at the ad group level without a clear understanding of what ads perform best with what keywords. SKAGs inject that clarity into the alpha-beta approach.
Wait…what about testing?
Testing is a vital part of AdWords success no matter how you structure your accounts. Having multiple ads to a/b test within an ad group won’t disrupt your SKAG strategy. It offers the same benefits a/b testing would offer if you had multiple keywords in one ad group.
The alignment between ads and keywords opens up other testing possibilities. We mentioned earlier that SKAGs let you make defacto keyword-level bid modifications for devices and locations. Both options can be tested with SKAGs, so you not only do the modification but test how they perform at the keyword level.
For PPC marketers starting a new paid search account, or looking to take their existing account to the next level, single-keyword ad groups offer a great path to success. They make it possible to achieve better alignment between ads and search queries, leading to higher Quality Scores and more opportunities to test and optimize.
Google has started automatically adding new ad variations to AdWords accounts. While I believe this will benefit the majority of advertisers who don’t manage their accounts very actively, this is a scary thought for the typical ad agency, or advanced PPC account manager who does a lot of controlled experimentation.
Right now only about 2,000 accounts are in the experiment and they’ve all been notified by email. If you want to check whether any of your accounts have already been added, or if you want to automate checking in the future, I wrote a new AdWords Script to help.
Simply grab the code and copy-and-paste it into the AdWords Scripts section of your MCC account. Here’s our help article on how to install an AdWords Script.
If you want to get an email if your account has active ads with the label “Added by AdWords”, add your email address in the line that says:
var EMAIL = “”;
Then schedule the script to run daily or weekly and get an email as soon as we detect there are automatically added ads in the account.
Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) from Google AdWords are now available for all advertisers to create. To help everyone who’s too busy to write thousands of new ads but who still wants to make the transition quickly we’ve just released a new free AdWords Script.
The script uses your landing pages’ meta tags to make suggestions for the new longer ad components. The title tag gets split into 2 lines of ad headlines and the meta description’s first 80 characters become the basis of the ad description line.
The script outputs a Google Sheet that can be imported into the AdWords Editor after you make any final tweaks to your ETAs.
Copy the code into your own AdWords account and give it a try:
Step-by-step for Using AdWords Scripts
If you’ve not worked with AdWords Scripts yet, this is a great way to get your feet wet. The script simply outputs a spreadsheet of data and makes no changes to your account so it’s a very low-risk way to try things out. Here is a quick step-by-step:
Copy the script code from the section above
Copy-and-paste it into the Bulk Operations > Scripts section of your AdWords account
put it into a child account and not in an MCC account
the code should completely replace any other code already in the script
Edit the text between lines 23 and 29 to customize the script
Authorize, Save, and finally Preview the script
Switch to the “Logs” view of the output and make sure the script ran successfully
Open the just-created Google Sheet and make final tweaks to the bulk sheet of expanded text ads
Go to the AdWords Editor and go to the menu for “Account” > “Import” and either import the data from a file or by copy-and-pasting
Do a final review of changes and apply the changes to your account.
Congrats! You just used AdWords Scripts to save yourself a ton of time…
Try Some Other AdWords Scripts
We have lots of other scripts to try and they’re all on our patent pending Enhanced Scripts™ platform so that the code will work equally well on MCC and child accounts, you can maintain multiple settings per account, easily maintain different settings different accounts, and most importantly, all without ever touching a single line of code. If you can copy-and-paste, you can use our Enhanced Scripts™ for AdWords.
A good account structure is still one of the most important aspects of managing an AdWords account. It makes it easy to manage different types of bid adjustments and track performance.
Keyword grouping is essential to a good account structure because it affects ad relevance and in turn Quality Score. Over the years account managers have come up with different methodologies to structure AdWords accounts. All these methodologies target a stronger keyword-ad relevance and a higher Quality Score. One such methodology is SKAG or Single Keyword Ad Group that is probably the utopia of keyword grouping. As the name suggests, each keyword has it’s own ad group which makes it possible to achieve a very high keyword-ad relevance. However, this is not always easy to do.
Optmyzr has automated routine processes like adding new keywords, pausing non-converting keywords as well as adding negatives through One-Click Optimizations™. One such optimization is the Keyword Lasso where our system recommends adding high performing search terms as keywords. This enables users to manage them better by setting bids and writing relevant ad text. Suggestions from the search terms report also bring out new keyword themes that require keywords to be put in individual ad groups.
New Keyword Lasso – With SKAG support
In the new version of the Keyword Lasso One-Click Optimization™we’ve added a feature that lets you create new ad groups from within Optmyzr. This feature can create ad groups using a template which enables automating methodologies like SKAG. It’s as easy as selecting a list of search terms and clicking a button to move them into individual ad groups.
Also, the tool automatically copies over all the ads from the ad group that triggered the search term. If search terms across multiple ad groups are being combined, it selects all the ads from the best performing ad group and uploads them to the new ad groups. It also sets bids for the search terms that are being added to be the same as the keywords they matched to. You can read more about the new Keyword Lasso and SKAG feature here.
70 characters for ad text, 25 characters for headline, and 35 characters for the display URL are all you get in AdWords to convey the message about your product or service. Although, success in AdWords depends a lot on your product and website, the first step is to get potential customers to your site by clicking on your ad. After you have worked out the structure of ad group themes, chosen relevant keywords, it is important that you do not overlook the ad copy. The ad copy must be informative and engaging at the same time. So, let’s see what it takes to write stellar ad copy!
Let’s start with this ad. This is a fine example of how an ad should be.
First, the headline should grab a user’s attention instantly and they should be aware of what you are offering
The first description line should induce interest
The second description line should convert that interest to the intended action
Finally, the display URL must take the user to the page where they can complete the intended action
Use keywords in the headline
Include keywords in your ad text without using any synonyms. If the keyword in the ad headline matches a user’s search query, it will appear in bold and make your ad stand out from the other ads on the page. It also helps establish a strong relation between your product/service and what the user is looking for which increases the likelihood of a user clicking on the ad.
Use numbers
Using numbers in ads creates a perfect block between long sentences, making them more visually appealing while adding specific information at the same time.
Including price points like ‘$49 only’ tells people what they are getting into and sets the right expectation. When you mention the price, it prevents people who have a fixed price in mind from clicking on the ad which saves unwanted clicks. Describing USPs like 100% custom made or 100% money-back guarantee helps establish credibility and trust and boosts the user’s confidence in your product/service.
Call to action
Having a call to action in the ad text is important. A call to action phrase tells users what they are supposed to do. For example, ‘Order Online Now’ tells the user that they can click on the ad and order the product instantly. If you’re offering a SaaS product, mentioning ‘Start Free Trial’ in the ad text tells users that they can try your product before buying it. Call now, order now, sign up, get a quote, buy now are some other call to action phrases that you can use. If you’re running a sale or have limited stock, using words like ‘Hurry’ induces a sense of urgency.
Good formatting
Always double-check your copy for typographical and grammatical errors. Running ads with errors affects credibility and doesn’t create a good impression. Another best practice is capitalizing the first letter of each word in your ad. This makes the ad copy look catchy. Look out for extra spaces, unclear URLs, and uneven capitalization.
Landing page
Now that you have written a great ad, it is time to create a great landing page experience for your users.
Make sure your landing page has content which is directly related to the ad text and keyword.
The website should be very easy to navigate and it shouldn’t take more than a few clicks to buy the product or complete the intended action.
Make sure landing pages load fast because customers don’t have patience and will leave your site.
Make sure you give enough information about the product on the landing page as it builds trust and makes it easier for users to make a decision.
The landing page directly impacts conversions, ad rank, and Quality Score.
Once you’ve created the right ads, make sure to test them on a regular basis. This is because performance data is the only measure of success. Optmyzr’s AB Testing for Ads Tool helps find ads that are underperforming and gives you the option to pause them with a single click. You can also create new ads to test.
I spend a lot of time talking and writing about the more humanistic elements of advertising; how to appeal to your audience in a unique and personal way, how to create a genuine connection with your visitors and so on and so forth. In our experience, there’s a lot to be said for these sorts of unquantifiable things that often get overlooked amongst the maelstrom of statistical analysis and data crunching.
Often times we need to make a judgment call that accounts for both our intuition and the immutable data our campaigns accrue.
That being said there are times when it’s important to sublimate our instinctual emotions and optimize our campaigns within the ruthlessly unforgiving framework of our historical data.
A/B split testing ad copy is one these instances.
Few, if any, of the standard optimization techniques we SEMs use will yield as consistent and predictable results as A/B split testing our ad copy. We can peel and stick keywords into new ad groups, restructure our account to work on our Quality Scores, readjust our custom bidding schedule with the hope of increasing our conversion rates – but they’re all inherently unpredictable to a certain extent. A/B split testing ad copy, when done right, will guarantee that your KPI of choice will increase (however incrementally) over time.
However, there are some important things to understand about A/B split testing ad copy that will spell the difference between your tests’ success or failure.
Setting yourself up for success in Adwords
Optmyzr provides by far the most advanced and efficient A/B split testing tools available to agencies and individual advertisers, but you need to make sure your AdWords campaigns are configured in a way that will help you run your split tests appropriately from within the Optmyzr dashboard.
By default, AdWords will optimize your ad rotation based on the ads expected to get the most clicks. This is great – if you’re lazy 🙂
If Google rotates your ads based on the ads expected to get the most clicks, you’ll generally see one or two of the ads in a given ad group getting the lion’s share of impressions and clicks. Naturally.
A/B split testing is all about getting statistically significant data across all the ads involved in any given test, so the first thing you need to do is change the ad rotation settings to rotate evenly. AdWords offers the option to rotate evenly for 90 days and then optimize, but since we’re going to be A/B split testing long after 90 days (right!?) we want to choose the “rotate indefinitely” option.
You can change this setting in the campaign setting tab. Keep in mind, since this is a setting modified at the campaign level, it will apply the rotation setting to all the ad groups in the campaign.
Developing your A/B Split Tests
Now that we’ve configured our ads to rotate evenly, we need to figure out what to test and how to test it. Based on how much data your account is generating you’re going to have to decide what type of split test you want to run.
People often confuse technical terminology, so we’ll begin by defining the difference between a multivariate (full factorial) test and an A/B test.
A/B split tests are the easiest to run and unless your landing pages are getting high volumes of daily traffic, an A/B split test is the method of choice (in my opinion at least). While many people think that A/B split testing is strictly for testing one individual variable, that’s not really the case. You can run 2 completely different ads against each other (or 3 or 4 for that matter), with different headlines, description text and display URLs, and still call it an A/B split test.
If you’re just measuring which ad performed the best, and not which individual variable performed the best, it’s an A/B test.
A multivariate test is when you seek to learn which individual variable performed the best. In other words, if you were testing 4 different variables (headline, description line 1, description line 2 and display URL), you would need to write 16 different ads (all possible combinations) in order to see which combination of variables worked the best. For most accounts, multivariate tests sound great in theory but don’t work so effectively in practice. In order to determine a winning ad, you need statistically significant data. Most accounts aren’t getting the kind of volume to make multivariate tests worth the time and effort.
So for our sake, let’s go back and talk a little more about A/B split tests.
I strongly recommend running single variable A/B split tests whenever possible (and let’s face it … it’s always possible). When you run 2 ads alongside each other testing just one variable, you know what element in the ad accounted for the better (or worse) performance.
For example, say you decided to run an A/B test on 2 different ad headline ideas. You’re a high end self-publishing company and you thought it may be a good idea to include your minimum order price in your ad headline to help dissuade people looking for cheap solutions from clicking on your ad. So you write two identical ads and only change the ad headline in one of them to include your minimum order price. When the statistically significant (more on that soon) results are in, you’ll know beyond the shadow of a doubt that it was the change in the ad headline that accounted for the difference in performance.
If for example you also changed the description lines of the ad to something other than the identical copy of the other ad in the ad group, you won’t know if it was the headline or the description or a combination of the two that accounted for the difference in performance.
Like we said, that would still be considered a valid A/B split test since we know one of the ads statistically outperformed the other ad, but we won’t know exactly which element of the ad should get the credit.
That being said, there are times a multivariable A/B split test is really useful. If you’re running a new ad group and you have two completely separate ideas that are thematically dissimilar, running two completely separate ads in an A/B test to determine which direction you should take for future tests could be a really useful strategy to use.
Let’s go back to our previous example of your high-end self-publishing company. You’re not sure whether highlighting the speed and quality of your service or the professionalism and experience of your editorial staff would make for a better ad. These are two separate ideas, and with the allotted ad space you can’t cover both aspects of the business. In this case, it may be a good idea to run a multivariable A/B test with one ad focusing primarily on the speed and quality and another ad focusing primarily on the editorial staff. You’re not testing any one variable like a headline, but rather a concept as a whole. Once your test determines which ad is more appealing (based on the KPI you choose to measure by – more on that soon) you can then dive into single variable A/B tests to further refine your copy and consistently increase performance.
For the sake of not getting stuck in a rut of stagnation and complacency, it’s always a good idea to periodically test new multivariable “concept” ads to try and find new ideas that you haven’t explored in the past.
Now that we know the sort of test we want to run, what do we actually test? You’ll probably get five different answers to this question if you ask five different people, so I’ll just tell you what we’ve found from the hundreds of accounts we’ve managed over the past few years.
Start with A/B testing ad headlines. When testing one variable like a headline, I generally aim to write four variations – which of course would give us four separate ads in an ad group. If you’re getting fewer than 75-100 clicks daily for any given ad group, consider writing 2-3 ads instead.
Your headline is not only the first element of your ad read by a user; it is often the only part of the ad that gets attention. If someone sees an ad headline they really like, they’ll often click the ad without reading the rest of what you have to say for yourself. Conversely, if the headline turns them off or isn’t precisely what they’re looking for, they’ll likely pass you on and move to the next ad on the page.
There’s a lot of information to swallow on a search engine results page, and people just don’t have the time or mental fortitude to read and analyze every line of every ad and organic result. It’s not something we advertisers like (after putting so much work into every character of our precious ads) but it’s the cold reality we have to eventually come to terms with. So in fewer words, test your headlines first. I hope most people would agree with that.
Following our logic, test your description lines of text next. Whether you test one line at a time or both lines of description text in one shot depends on your preference and the type of ad you’re writing (is there a distinct thought on each line or are both lines one long message?).
It’s a good idea to test your display URLs since the historical CTR of your display URLs plays a role in your Quality Score. Don’t expect to see dramatic results from an A/B test on display URLs (if there’s one part of your ad someone won’t read, it is the display URL), but test them anyway for the sake of Quality Score and for the sake of doing your job right.
What specifically to test is a longer discussion for another time but I try to always think of the products and services we’re advertising more in the context of their emotional benefits to the customer and less in the context of their features. Nobody buys a vacuum because they want a vacuum; they buy a vacuum because they want a clean room. We’ve seen some extraordinary A/B test results testing features VS. benefits (“bag-less and compact!” VS. “a home as clean as you after a long hot shower!”), and in almost every case, highlighting benefits and emotional payoffs always produce better results.
Also consider the idea of what I like to call qualifiers. Qualifying your clicks by including prices in your ads is one way of dissuading undesirable clicks from people whose traffic you don’t want to pay for.
A/B testing landing pages is also something that is highly effective, but with the advent of complex A/B landing page tools and software it has become an industry unto itself and need not conflict with your ad copy A/B split tests.
I’d be remiss to not mention the idea of testing your call to action. Of course, you have a call to action (right!?), and it’s a great idea to test different CTA’s to see which ones capture the attention of your audience the most effectively.
Now that we know how and what to test, let’s take a look at how we measure and define the results of our tests.
Statistical significance
If we didn’t have a tool like Optmyzr, the next few paragraphs would probably (definitely) bore you half to death. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather watch paint dry than talk, write or listen to anything that had to do with coefficients, correlations and the holy grail of statistical measurements – p values.
Luckily for all of us, Optmyzr does all that work for us. But just for the sake of our intellectual well-being, a quick word on p values.
In a statistical test, a p value tells us how significant, or scientifically interesting, our results are. We may find that headline A had a higher CTR than headline B, but how confident can we be that we’d see the same results if we ran the same test again? And again after that?
Our p values (also referred to as our confidence interval) tell us how confident we can be that we’d see the same results repeated, or in other words how reliable our findings were. A p value is just a number outputted by the statistical equations used to calculate the correlation between our variables, and depending on the field of study, different p values represent different thresholds of acceptability.
In the medical profession, when the results of a test can quite literally inform a surgeon on a life and death decision, a p value of less than .01 is required to determine reliability. For AdWords, a slightly less precarious area of study, we could assume that a p value of less than .05 is perfectly acceptable. In fact, in the social sciences p<.05 is the benchmark for reliability.
At this point you’re probably thinking if you never hear the words p value again it would be too soon. Amen to that, brother. I promise, it’s going to be lots of colorful pictures from here on out.
Since this isn’t a beginner’s Optmyzr tutorial, I’m going to assume basic working knowledge of the Optmyzr dashboard.
So we’ve configured and launched our split test, and now we want to see if we have enough statistically significant data to pick our winners.
Navigate over to the A/B testing for ads under the one click optimizations dropdown in Optmyzr.
Before we analyze our results, we’ll want to take a look at the settings Optmyzr allows us to configure.
Remember p values? That’s what OPTMYZR is referring to with Required Confidence. By default it’s set to 95% (p<.05) and that’s a good place for it to stay. You can also filter your results by Ad Type, Network, Minimum Impressions Per Ad and the Date Range.
The important option to look at here is the Parameter options list. As you can see from the first image, Optmyzr sets our parameter to CTR by default. This means that the statistical analysis will look at CTR as our key performance indicator of choice to determine the winning ad. As you can see from the green and red highlights in the CTR column, CTR is the metric being “studied” in this test.
You can also choose to run the A/B test results using conversion rate and conversions per impression as your metric of choice.
In order to determine which parameter you should use depends on the strategy behind the ad groups you’re testing ads in. If you’re running a broader, loosely targeted campaign to drive traffic to your site so you could build your remarketing audiences or your brand awareness, CTR may very well be the metric of choice for you. If your campaign is designed to drive profit and a positive ROI, then you may want to analyze your ad performance in the context of conversion rate.
Because the campaign we’re looking at here is a branding campaign, I care primarily about visitors to the site – so I’ll keep CTR as our metric of choice.
So for this A/B test we’re testing two different headlines. Based on a confidence level of 95%, Optmyzr outputs a winning ad using CTR as our metric of choice.
But can you spot something wrong?
The winning ad has a much higher volume of clicks and impressions as the losing ad. This is because the ads in this ad group were not set to rotate indefinitely and Google was giving preference to the ad expected to get more clicks. While the test results are still statistically significant, we want our data to be more equal when it comes to the volume of clicks and impressions.
Let’s hop over to another account to see what a proper A/B test should look like.
In this example, we ran a multivariable A/B test on two different overall ad concepts. Even though the winning ad still has quite a few more clicks than the loser, the losing ad has enough volume to lend real validity to the results of this test.
Notice another thing. Even though my parameter of choice over here is still CTR, Optmyzr graciously lets us know if another one of the metrics also matches up with statistical significance at our desired confidence interval. In this example, the winning ad also has a statistically significant higher Conversion per Impression rate than the losing ad. Good to know!
If you run into instances when one ad wins on CTR but loses on conversion rate, you need to seriously think about the campaign strategy and decide which metric to base your optimizations off of.
If you haven’t fallen in love with Optmyzr, you will now!
Not only does Optmyzr make it incredibly easy (and a little fun) to run AB split tests results across an entire account in one shot, Optmyzr also allows you to pause the losing ads from each split test with the click of a button.
By default, Optmyzr selects all the losing ads across all the ad groups and A/B tests that had statistically significant results within your defined parameters.
If you’re satisfied with the results, you can click the blue “Pause Selected Ads” button in the upper right hand corner and the losing ads will be paused inside your live AdWords account. Seriously, how cool is that?
But now that you’ve paused one of the ads, you want to write a new ad in its place so you could run another A/B test. Optmyzr has another incredibly useful tool that allows you to do just that without leaving the dashboard.
By clicking the “Create Ad” button in the upper right hand corner of an ad group’s section, Optmyzr presents you with a dialogue box that will allow you write a new ad and publish it live in the ad group you selected. Even cooler, Optmyzr gives you suggestions for each element of the text ad based on results from historical data and previous A/B tests run in the account.
As you can see, OPTMYZR offers a completely thorough solution to do A/B split testing in an easy, aesthetically simple and intuitive way.
The best way to get a sense of how it works is to just go in there and mess around with the different parameters. Once you get the hang of it, running what would otherwise have been complex analysis will take you a couple minutes.
Conclusion
A/B split testing ad copy gets overlooked even though it’s one of the most reliable and effective forms of optimization. Because of its inherent complexities and ambiguities, we sort of just gloss over it picking and choosing winning ad copy based more on our intuition than on statistically sound results.
Optmyzr’s A/B split testing tool really changes that for a lot of people by simplifying a complex task and making it incredibly easy and hassle-free to perform regularly and effectively.
Even though we rely heavily on statistical evidence with A/B tests, it’s crucial to express your creative voice and use your intuitive sense to determine what, where and how to test. By combining your unique personality and some good statistical analysis, you’ll be A/B testing like a pro.
Again, it’s easy to get complacent in a certain holding pattern with A/B tests, so remind yourself once every couple months (or weeks) to go back to the drawing board and test some new “concept” ads.
If you have any interesting data on A/B tests you’ve run in the past, I’d love to hear about them. Of course, any comments or questions are more than welcome (leave them below), and I’ll be sure to get back to you.
If you’ve made it all the way down here, I really appreciate you taking the time to read this post. Looking forward to next time …
Happy Testing!
Learn more about how I manage AdWords accounts at Adventure PPC.
Removing underperforming ads is one part of testing ad text in an AdWords account. The other part of the process is to create new ads so you can continue testing new ad copy. Optmyzr’s AB Testing For Ads optimization already lets you remove underperforming ads with one click. Creating ads in this optimization was a long standing request from our users and we’re happy to announce that this feature is now available!
You can now instantly create ads in ad groups from which you remove underperforming ads. What takes this feature to the next level is that the system automatically recommends high performing headlines, description lines and display URLs to choose from. This makes creating new ads efficient and easy.
Step 1
In the AB Testing for ads optimization, all ad groups that have underperforming ads are displayed. There is a button above the results to create ads in each ad group.
Step 2
Clicking on ‘Create Ad’ will open up an easy-to-use interface that will let you create ads in the ad group. When you click on each component (headline, description lines) of the ad, the system automatically shows you the best performing options. You can either choose from the options displayed or write your own text.
Step 3
Clicking on ‘Create Ad’ in the ad creation window will upload the ad instantly to your AdWords account. You’ll see a message that it has been successfully uploaded at the bottom of the window. In case there is an error and AdWords rejects the ad, the system will let you know that the ad was not uploaded. You can continue to create additional ad variations in the same window and upload the ads in your AdWords account.
Try out this feature in the AB Testing for Ads Optimization here.
AdWords gives you limited characters to get your message across in an ad. You want to use the characters available in the best possible manner. Very often, this means foregoing punctuation in the ad text. Earlier, it was not important to add punctuation in ad text because you were not following grammar rules. However, now it has become almost imperative to do so.
Google keeps trying new ways of showing ads in the top positions above the search results. Sometimes the description line 1 is moved up to show with the headline, sometimes Description line 2 is moved up to show with description line 1. In the first case, Google adds a hyphen between the headline and description line 1. However, in the second case it just moves the description line 2 up. So, if the description lines don’t have punctuation or conjunctions then it appears as one long sentence which doesn’t make sense to the user when they read it.
If the user doesn’t understand the text in your ad he/she will just move to the next ad. Your ad is showing in the most coveted position on the search page but you lose out because you didn’t use a full-stop or comma. In the long run, this will affect ad performance because the ad will accrue impressions but few clicks which means a low clickthrough rate (CTR).
Next time when writing ad text, don’t eliminate the comma or full-stop.
Display ads can be quite effective in building a brand and can be more engaging than text ads. You can either upload image ads you already have or, use the display ad builder to create display ads using templates. The display ad builder tool enables small businesses to create display ads without spending money on a designer. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just create a display ad from a text ad? Now you can in just three quick steps.
There is a feature in AdWords using which you can create display ads from existing text ads. The system uses the text in your ad and pulls images from your website to create display ads in all six sizes that you can show ads in. You have the option to edit almost all elements of the display ad like text, image, company logo, color. You also have the flexibility of editing the size of images and text boxes.
How to get started
1. Go to the ‘Ads’ tab and select the text ad you want to convert into a display ad
2. Click on ‘More Actions’ and select ‘Generate display ad’
3. You’ll see a number of display ad designs on your screen. Select one of them and click ‘Edit’. The edit option becomes visible once you hover or click on the ‘Select’ button for one of the display ad designs.
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4. After editing, click ‘Done’ and your display ads are ready.
The entire process takes less than five minutes and is very easy to follow! If you’ve been thinking of trying out display ads, this is a good way to test the waters.
