ClickEquations Take Guess Work Out of Testing PPC Ad Copy

Testing ad copy is essential to the efficient running of a paid search campaign. Poor ad copy is the difference between trust and recognition of your brand in an extremely competitive marketplace which, if you learn the hard way, will have ultimately cost you hundreds of dollars in lost opportunities. By contrast, fantastic ad copy saves you money, increases the visibility and delivery of your ads and gives you a continual edge on your competitors. However, testing 5 different sets of ad copy over hundreds, if not thousands, of keyword variations becomes not only time consuming but unintuitive.

Step in, ClickEquations Text Ad Zoom. A new feature designed to help marketers sort ‘the wheat from the chaff’ in PPC ad copy testing. Where the typical paid search interface will compare ad copy by clickthrough or conversion rate, but leaves the user to determine if the overall delivery of the ad constituted a fair test or not; ClickEquations Text Ad Zoom will tell you whether the ad test is statistically significant or not.

A Typical Use Case
Below is a common scenario using real data but with masked name and ad copy (highlights are ours and each image can be enlarged on click). As you can see in the final screen, a Yes or No is displayed under a special column labelled ‘Significant?’.

1. So, ClickEquations Adviser has alerted the user to poor performing ad copy in the system and a task panel has been opened to examine the data. In there you can see some underperforming ads:

2. Looking through the list, you see that there is a text ad with poor conversion rate. You are very busy (this may be one of a hundred ad tests), so your gut feeling might be to simply pause that ad and move on. Especially as the clickthrough rates on the other ads seem to be performing well. However, the risk here is that the test does not have enough data to be a statistically significant measure of user behavior. Therefore, you could be optimizing your campaigns on chance alone.

3. To counter the risk of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater“, we open the Text Ad Zoom pane. There it shows the Best Performing Ad on top, above the other ad copy tests. The alternative ad copy tests listed below are scored by a Yes/No remark in the “Significant” column.

This index has calculated statistical significance of the test and lets us know whether or not the ad copy test is valid. Now, we can pause one of the text ads directly from that task panel.

Which one should be paused?

If you paused the bottom ad, because it had the lowest clickthrough rate (1.2%), then you are probably in need of Text Ad Zoom.

If you paused the ad with the 1.8% clickthrough rate because a statistically significant test has shown it to generate a 5% lower conversion rate, then pat yourself on the back as you have made the entire campaign spend more efficient.