A Crucial Role of A/B Experiments for Successful PPC Campaigns

At the initial level of campaign set-up, we need to explore all options that can drive best possible result and experiments should be your best weapon to count on. Below, I explained some crucial elements of the PPC campaign, which you can enhance with various experiments.

Phrase Match VS Broad Match Modifier

It all starts with bidding on good keywords and phrase match keywords are something that we can’t ignore due to inconsistency of search queries used by your customers on Google.

Previously, when there wasn’t any facility of broad match modifier, we didn’t really have any option to restrict certain search queries triggered by your phrase match keywords which are close, but not relevant and the only way to restrict these search queries is, to set those queries as negative keywords.

If your campaign is built around thousands of phrase match keywords, it is almost impossible to manage the negative keywords on regular base.

All thanks to the broad match modifier, now you can restrict your keywords more efficiently with use of it.

So, review your search query data of your campaign, if you found irrelevant keywords, instead of specifying those queries as negative keywords, try to find the phrase match keyword that triggered your ads and converts it into a broad match modifier and see the impact.

In most of cases, setting broad match modifier will help you eliminating irrelevant search queries and would result in better traffic. Instead of relying on old fashioned phrase match keywords, try broad match modified on certain ad groups which have good traffic and conversions and see if you can increase more conversions and relevant clicks without making any change to individual bids.

Enhanced CPC VS Conversion Optimizer

When you are running out of time and have large campaigns, sometimes enhanced CPC and conversion optimizer seems to be working. Both work on the same principle, adjusting your bids for keywords which seems more promoting in bringing conversions but the way each works is different.

Enhanced CPC increases the bids up to 30% for the keywords which have high possibilities to convert comparing with your past historical data and you need to define the highest amount that you want to pay per click.

In case of conversion optimizer, instead of defining the max CPC you specify the amount that you want to pay for each conversion which is also known as CPA bid. Based on your CPA bid, Adword adjusts the bids for different keywords and try to create a sequence of clicks which brings conversion within your specified CPA bid limit.

If you have enabled any of it, instead of just relying on specific one, you should experiment with both and see which brings better result with less spend. If you haven’t enabled it or about to enable it, make sure you have implemented goals and conversions very precisely in your account, otherwise it won’t help you to get expected result in either way.

Call only Ads VS Regular Ads

For the business where main leads are through phone calls, you must try new ad format recently introduced by Google Adword. Before a year when call extensions were new in Adword, people used to specify phone no. in the description of the ad text, users can call without clicking on it.

With the introduction of call extension, Google strictly restricted phone no. in ad description and must be used as call extension.

Now, to improve better conversions and leads for mobile users, it has introduced a new ad format which allows specifying phone no in your headline so users searching on mobile device can easily access your no and call you instantly on the go. So, instead of heading text, you can specify your phone no. as the ad headline.

As we said, if your business strategy pretty much depends on leads through phone calls, you must try these new calls only campaigns to drive more calls through Adwords.

To get best results, try to implement call tracking, with Google forward no. to analyze the impact of these new ads more precisely.

Landing Pages

Well optimized landing page can become a deal closer to your Adword campaign. Along with the other two factors like keyword bid and ad text relevancy, landing page quality is also one of the factors Google considers for calculating your quality score. So, not just from users prospective, it also have an impact on your quality score and thus helps in increasing your ad position with gradual improvement in quality score.

There are two ways you can make experiments with your landing page. First is to replace the entire landing page and test which works best. This method is less recommended as changing entire page may not drive best results and also it is time consuming to develop two pages.

The second method is replacing certain elements that encourage visitors to take action that is profitable for your business. You may try different call to action functions, promotional text, images or interactive elements like quick inquiry form or call back button. Along with changing the design of the elements, you can also test the position of the different elements and see what works best in your campaign.

If you have a large budget on hand and goal is to achieve profitability till the positive ROI, you should integrate multi-variant testing in your landing page that will help a lot to understand the well performing version of different elements. It will become much easier if you enable campaign experiment and make changes to have clear statistics in Adword itself in a well controlled manner.

Manual Bidding & Automated Rules

Last but not the least, when bidding on keywords it may be good practice to set automated bidding on initial level to get some ideas on required bid to acquire top position for your targeted keywords.

Gradually after some time when you start to analyze your campaign statistics and try to figure out which bidding works best for your business, you may try switching to manual bidding with turning automated rules on.

Factors that are working well like average position where you get good leads, average bid for the specific group of keywords, business hours with maximum leads, etc. You should try automated rules with a combination of manual bidding to have control of things you think working well for your campaign within your budget constraint.

When the objective is to increase the campaign performance, above are some ways you can execute the progress of your campaign to get the desired results within your defined budget.