Ads are the only part of your account a searcher sees. They set the expectation for what the user will find on the landing page. When we think about the basics of testing; we can test in 3 ways:
Let’s take a brief look at how to set these up and the metrics to use.
In an ad versus ad test; this is simple. You first choose if you are using multi-ad group or single ad group testing (more info on that here).
Next you create your test and pick winners based upon your testing metrics, which are determined by your overall goals.
In general, we prefer conversion per impression or revenue per impression metrics. With impression based metrics, we’re looking at opportunity. The ad being shown to a user (impression) is the opportunity; so it’s best to measure from the impression.
In landing page testing; you have two options:
If you are testing multiple pages; then you can create two ads:
This test will send the traffic to two different pages using the same ad copy; and the ad data will show you which combination is best.
With landing page test, you do not want to use impression based metrics as the user doesn’t know the landing page before they see it. With landing page testing you want to use conversion rate or ROAS (as page’s may differ in both quality score and average checkout amounts) as your testing metrics.
If you are testing landing page templates and the base template is being used in many ad groups, you can also use multi-ad group testing to see which template is preforming the best across your ad groups.
This is sometimes called customer journey testing. You are testing how two different pages and two different ads act in combination with each other. Even this testing is simple to setup:
This test will show how each combination of ad and landing page message interacts with each other.
With this test, you can use the ad data to determine your winning ad and landing page combination. As you are testing the entire customer journey; you should use impression based metrics, such as conversion per impression or revenue per impression since they will combine CTR and conversion rate into a simple number to show you which overall combination is preforming the best for you.
We did a webinar with Unbounce that covered testing metrics and testing ad and landing page combinations that you can see here.