Ad testing tools can help PPC marketers by automatically creating ad tests. A computer can easily detect where you are split testing and automate your ad testing workflow saving you valuable time and resources.
Although you can always manually compare the performance of individual ads, this approach would be hard to scale. With automated ad A/B testing tools, you can test hundreds and thousands of ads in bulk, as well as make sure you achieve statistical significance before you make any decisions and take action.
Some A/B testing tools (such as the award-winning ad testing tool in Adalysis) will even allow you to pause and replace losing ads automatically. This will save you a significant amount of time and help you to always be testing new messages until you find what makes your customers tick.
If you want to learn more about a professional approach to ad testing, see our ultimate Guide to Scientific Ad testing.
In this article, we will tell you more about working with specialized tools for ad copy testing.
The A/B testing concept is familiar to anyone working in marketing. In PPC management, we can test nearly everything impacting our bottom line – starting from ad groups organization and Google Ads campaign structure and ending with bids and bidding strategies.
What is often being neglected is ad copy. Many PPC managers will start with a Google recommended a number of ads per ad group and then just forget about it, relying on Google to choose the winner.
However, this often turns out to be leaving profit on the table. Just look at the example below. In this campaign with optimized ad rotation settings, the ad with the best data in every metric was served 55,656 times versus the ad that is a statistically significant loser in every metric being served almost 6 times as often at 299,221 impressions over the same period of time.
If this company just paused the losing ad, their clicks and conversions would immediately increase!
Now, when you see how significant ad copy testing can be, let’s look at what types of ad A/B tests you should and could be running with automated ad testing tools.
This type of A/B tests, which in Adalysis is called single ad group testing, will automatically test any ad group that has at least two ads, to help you continually improve your account performance.
You don’t need to do anything to start testing ad copy. We test each and every ad you may have against 6 different metrics – CTR, conversion rate, cost per conversion, conversion value/cost, as well as conversions per impression and conversion value per impression (read why impression-based metrics are a great way to test your performance).
Once we see that your results are statistically significant, we will notify you on your Adalysis dashboard. You will see the results of your A/B test along with the expected performance boost in case you pause your losing ad.
After analyzing the results, you can pause losing ads and increase your performance immediately.
More advanced users can set up the Auto pause feature – this will automatically pause losing ads in your selected campaigns and ad groups, once statistically significant A/B test results are achieved.
If you want to look for commonalities across your best-performing ad copy across the entire campaign or even account, you can use multi-ad group testing in Adalysis. For example, you may want to find out how different Headlines 1 perform in all your campaigns (and not in one ad group only).
To set up the test, you will need to select the campaign(s) and then choose the ad components you want to compare. If there is enough data, Adalysis will instantly show you the winning element; if not, we will offer you to save the setup and run the test daily, until statistical significance is achieved. After that, you will be able to pause ads with losing patterns and replace the losing element with a new one in bulk.
In addition to single and multi-ad group testing, all Adalysis users can instantly access the powerful Ad inspector. Here you will see the performance metrics for your 20 best-performing Headlines 1, Headlines 2, Headlines 3, Descriptions 1, and Descriptions 2.
You will also see heatmaps of intersections of the different elements – this will help you spot the best combinations and find the recipe for your killer ad copy!
It’s worth mentioning that Adalysis will also help you test not only text ads for Search campaigns, but also Image ads for Google Display Network campaigns. Plus, we are great assistance for everyone who wants to test Responsive Search Ads – we will run a test for you and show in which ad groups RSA are performing better than your text ads.
With Responsive Search Ads now being the default ad option, you shouldn’t fall into the common fallacy that you can now leave all the work of figuring out the best ad element combinations to Google. You can see here some ideas on how to approach A/B testing RSA. However, all the strategies listed in the article involve quite a lot of manual work related to creating and modifying RSA assets in bulk (such as pinning, editing, etc.). Adalysis now has an entire set of tools specifically designed to serve this need.
Ad testing tools are just a part of award-winning Adalysis PPC software. Adalysis can help you in all other areas of Microsoft (Bing) and Google Ads campaign management.
Here are other tools you may want to check out:
Want to test the tools? Try Adalysis completely free for 14 days! No commitment, no credit card required – just import your Google Ads account and see what we can do for you.
Adalysis was founded in 2013 by PPC experts with more than 20 years of experience under their belts. Since then, we have helped PPC agencies, in-house PPC marketers and small business owners from all over the world to optimize their PPC efforts in the most cost-effective way possible, while increasing their overall conversions.