 Writing compelling ad copy in search engine marketing (SEM) plays a critical role in increasing your ad rank, boosting CTR’s and, most importantly, improving conversions. The desired outcome of an ad copy test is to determine what type of message delivers the highest CTR and lowest CPC, and ultimately what drives the most efficient cost for conversion. There are a number of elements that should be under your microscope when testing ad copy; some are click-through rate (CTR), ROI (return on investment), quality score, CPA (cost-per action or some other metric), conversion volume, total clicks and average position. After performing an ad copy test across a series of brand campaigns for one month, I found that including the brand followed by “Official Site” in the headline led to significantly better results: 10% increase in CTR and traffic; 12% increase in conversions; 22% lower CPC throughout all brand campaigns. It’s not surprising that the experiment ad with the official site messaging outperformed the control, which only included the brand name in the headline. Tracking Ad Copy Tests When performing an ad copy test, it is important that you know exactly what you are going to test, determine how long you plan on running the test and have an effective way of tracking and reporting the results. If you’re not organized when performing an ad copy test, then the chances of sabotaging or invalidating the test are very likely. Here is a checklist that all search engine marketers should adhere to before launching an ad copy test:  The winning formula for awesome ad copy testing! Choosing the Winning Ad Copy When it comes to determining the winning ad copy, it is important to use a statistically significant tool in order to determine that the result was not due to coincidence or chance. A test is statistically significant when there is an even and large set of data (impression volume) and the confidence level (expressed in %) of the winning ad copy will fall between a set of values. Statistical significance tools already provide us with the set of values, which simplifies the process of determining the winning ad copy. After the test runs for at least two weeks, you can determine if the test is statistically significant by using any of the statistically significant tools listed below: Get Data-Driven A/B Significance Test Point it Ad Copy A/B Testing for Statistical Significance Visual Website Optimizer A/B Split-Test Significance Calculator Ad Copy Testing Conclusion Testing ad copy in PPC is essential in order to increase overall account performance. While monitoring this particular test, I made sure that my campaign settings were set to rotate evenly, I allowed the test to run for over two weeks (in order to ensure that the test would be statistically significant), and I focused on the main metrics such as conversion volume, CPA, CTR, clicks and average position. After testing “official site” against the brand name as a standalone, the results indicate that using “official site” in the headline led to an overall increase in brand conversions, CTR and clicks while decreasing brand CPC’s.
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