When you are running a long term PPC campaign, ongoing testing is key. The hard part is to continue testing, even when you have an established and well running campaign. It’s easy to sit back and be satisfied with your ROI, but how do you know you aren’t leaving money on the table unless you continue to test? That’s what takes discipline, and if you have it you can separate yourself from the rest of you competitors.
This brings me to a task that I have started calling “pruning the trees”. I have this mental image of adgroups as branches on a tree, with the top performing ad texts as healthy branches shooting up. The bad performing ads are kind of scraggly branches growing off to the side. So just like if you want to keep a tree growing up, you have to prune off these side branches to let the good one keep growing up.
So for example, say you have an adgroup with 2 very strong ads pulling around 5% CTRs. Start throwing ads in there daily and let them run for a few days. Once you have this cycle going for a while, you can go in and prune out the bad ones, keeping the top ads in place. This will create a constant upward growth pressure on your adgroups. You are looking for that new ad that just may end up beating your top performers.
It’s important to note that by testing, you are going to use up some impressions on low performing ads, which would have otherwise gone to your top performers. That’s the cost of testing, but the rewards can exceed that cost if you hit on a great new ad copy.
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