Your campaigns are performing ok, now to take them to the next level? Brad Geddes (Founder bgTheory.com) and Thomas Bindl (SES Advisory Board & Founder and CEO Refined Labs GmbH) gave some pointers as how to do this at SES London today.

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Photo: Brad Geddes and Thomas Bindle

Testing – why and how

Testing is one of the best ways to take PPC campaigns to the next level, says Brad. And it isn’t difficult to do; you create a couple of different ads per ad group and run them for a month after which you determine which one drove the most revenue per impression (or whatever other objective you had).

So what other elements could you test?

  • Conversion rates
  • You can test pricing: when your prices are competitive, when there are large price ranges and for shopping comparison.
  • Discounts in your ad copy. Keep in mind that if you make more revenue with fewer conversions without discount it might not be a good idea and the discount should be competitive to be effective.
  • Call to actions
  • Test informational ads (for example ‘Learn with headsets have the highest sound quality on your phone’)
  • Test dynamic keywords 
  • Testing with ad rotation. You can see very large data casing by making very small actual changes

Consider emotional responses when writing ads

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Thomas Bindl elaborated on advanced paid search tactics by looking at position, match type and dynamic text insertion. An interesting result from his research was the small difference in CTR between ads with and without dynamic text. He explained this himself by guessing that the ads where no dynamic text had been used had instead been written in a very targeted manner and a targeted ad is a good ad no matter how it has been achieved.

Another eye brow raiser was his statistic that 97% of active keywords in accounts get no traffic. This shocked our Twitter following but from my experience as a search media analyst I know that there are many large account which include keywords that have not been researched but put together by concatenating random terms in excel (that nobody searches for in real life) so smart keyword research is key!

A last fact from Thomas was that 31% of SEO conversion had had a PPC touch point.

Stay tuned from more insights from SES London!

Thanks,

Simone 

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