3 pitfalls of PPC experiments
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3 pitfalls of PPC experiments
While there are many true-and-tried best practices in search marketing, the devil is in the details when it comes to achieving the best results. For example, it's hard to argue with the merits of automated bidding but it's not that hard to get bad results if you deploy it incorrectly.
Say you read that Hertz used smart bidding to reduce their CPA by 35% so you decide to deploy the same strategy in your account. If it were that simple to run a successful Google Ads account, we'd all be out of jobs. Simply knowing what feature to use isn't enough as you also need to know the right settings that will make it work as well for you as it did for the advertiser in the case study.
And to be the best search marketers we can be, we can't simply look at what other advertisers did. Instead, we can take hints from others and use it as the basis for honing in on what works for us. We have to discover the details of the right way ourselves.
And that's why being really good at PPC experimentation is so important. I spoke on this topic at SMX East in the session "Awesome Tests, Profitable Results," and here are some of the key takeaways.
The three most popular PPC testing methodologies
One of the key claims to fame of search marketing is that it's more measurable. So whenever we try something new, we better have some numbers to back up our findings so we need to run experiments in a structured manner.
There are three ways we usually see this done.
Before-and-after tests
The simplest way to start a test is to make a change in a live campaign and then compare the results from before and after the change was implemented. The beauty of this method is that you can test anything in your ads account