More business from Web Traffic

You would think that Google would be the best people to offer advice on how to set up and run an Adwords campaign but unfortunately that just isn’t true.

Their last piece of optimisation advice is not good advice at all

To be fair to Google, they have developed an excellent product with Adwords and their approach to Pay Per Click is as a true market leader but they are simply not the right people to advice on how best to use their product.

It’s like asking the designer of a racing car to be your driver. Whilst they may know the car inside out they certainly would not know how to drive it as well as someone like Lewis Hamilton.

To prove my point, the tip below was displayed to me when I logged onto one of the accounts I manage.

You might think this is a great tip. Get Google to automatically show the best performing Ad and improve your conversions by between 15% to 50%. However it’s not good advice at all.

Whilst I completely agree with Google that your best Ad can improve conversions massively, I just don’t agree that their process for automatically showing the best Ad is the best way to do this.

What Google’s automatic optimiser does is start to favour your best Ad almost as soon as one Ad out performs the other. That’s like saying that the best runner in a marathon is the one in front after the first lap. We all know the best runner is the one who crosses the finishing line first.

You see to really test two Ads, you need to let them compete equally over a period of time before you can really say which is best. To use my analogy above. You have to judge once the race has been run and not part way through it.

So I always advice that you run two (or more) Ads with the rotate ads evenly option until it is clear which one if the better one. I can usually judge this when both Ads have around 20 to 30 clicks. The CTR and more importantly the Conversion rates for the Ads will then tell you which is better.