Testing, testing, always be testing. Now that the holiday season has come and gone, guess what time it is? Testing time! Some of you even have some new budget to chip away at. What better use for that money than making your PPC campaigns convert better?
First, Ads
This one is “simple” or so it seems. But think about it, how long has it been since you played with your ad text. I’ll give you a few minutes … yeah, pretty long time huh? Take some time out of your schedule each week and tackle your ad groups one by one. Get some of your co-workers involved too! Test anything and everything. You never know what might convert better until you try.
Second, Landing Pages
This is another “well duh” moment, but many people talk of testing landing pages but never get the chance. My suggestion for the New Year is to pick one landing page to start with. Look at your call to action and change it somehow. Shorten the form, move it, change the color of the call to action button, etc. Pick one thing and go to town testing. One change can get you going on a host of other changes throughout the year.
Third, Ad Extensions
They aren’t made for everyone, but ad extensions can make your ads stand out from other ads in a way that no text change can. If you are ecommerce, try adding your products to the Google Merchant center. If you have a local business, use the location extension or phone extension. Everyone can try sitelinks. Who knows when that might come in handy and convert new visitors?
Fourth, Automatic Bidding
There are a number of types of automatic bidding in AdWords nowadays. The easiest is automatic bidding for optimal budget, but the best is automatic bidding for a target cost per conversion. You really have two options for conversion bidding, one is the more general bidding to increase the number of conversions, but the best is always CPA bidding. To use both of these you’ll need to be tracking conversions in AdWords and have a few conversions under your belt to set up the option. Once it is set up though, it provides the best bidding out there for small business optimizers.
Fifth, Experiments
Experiments are my current fun toy. With Google AdWords Experiments you can try keyword changes, keyword match type changes, bidding changes and even full ad group changes. This is a brand new area that I can’t wait to test a little more in 2011 and would be a great one for any PPCer to try out … if you haven’t already mastered them that is.
Happy New Year!
