What I am going to explain is how I have taken advantage of the ad variation feature of the Google Adwords service. This will be relevant to people who currently manage or are in the process of designing a PPC (Pay-per-click) campaign. I’ve had somewhat of an advantage in learning to use Google Adwords in that a large portion of my full time job at one point was to re-design our Adwords campaign (of about 20,000+ keywords) and with that came a budget which allowed me some leniency while burning the company’s money learning.

First a little bit about the PPC campaigns:
For ~20 campaigns we have running with these techniques and others, I have increased the monthly revenue generated from our Adwords campaigns 12 fold since May of 2006 and have held a consistent 10% ROI the entire time.

The Secret: The ad variation feature:
Google Adwords allows you ~50 ad variations for each ad group you are running. I have found that by creating the max amount of ad variations per ad group (at first), I have been able to determine which specific variation returns the higher click-through-rate (CTR). If you are unfamiliar with how Google Adwords works, basically Google favors ads with higher click through rates - meaning: the ads with higher CTRs are determined by Google to be more relevant for the user doing the search, and as part of Google’s strategy to remain the number one search engine, they give higher positions to your ads in the paid section of the SERP (Search engine results page) – at a discounted rate.

Ultimately this means that if you can achieve a higher CTR, you are creating more relevant ad groups with more relevant variations of ad copy and will eventually pay less per click giving you the competitive advantage over your competitors. The only cost of this technique is time and a shitload of little patience.

Before I get any further I want to explain this technique works best with campaigns that get a large amount of impressions and clicks but can be modified to still be effective for smaller campaigns. Basically the lower the number of clicks you have, the lower the number of variations you should use. The key is making sure you have enough clicks to make a reasonable decision to use one or the other variation.

I am running most of these campaigns opted out of the content network. The reason is that I’ve not been able to figure out a way to get any manageable data from my campaigns which run in the content network. If anyone has any suggestions about successfully managing a content network enabled campaign, please LMK.

Another important key to this technique is that the ~50 variations are basically different arrangements of only 4 significant variations of copy. My company sells sports and gaming trading cards (in singles, packs, decks, boxes, cases, etc.,) and one specific PPC campaign we have is for our football card products. One specific ad group for this campaign is designed specifically for ‘Old Football Cards’ referring to both vintage singles and factory sealed boxes. I currently have gotten down to 9 ad variations running for this ad group, with CTR’s ranging from 4.3% to 2.2%. The ad variations consist of variations of two of the following 4 lines:

- Huge Selection, Free Shipping!
- Old & New Cards, Boxes & Singles
- Call Toll Free: 1-888-440-9787
- Huge Selection! Old & New Cards

Another note: You have to make sure you change your campaign settings correctly to get the best results - Go to:
>Edit Campaign Settings >Advanced Options >Ad Serving and choose ‘Rotate’.

Setting Ad Serving to ‘Rotate’ will allow each variation to run equally for as long as you need and eliminate any early system bias. My ‘Old Football Cards’ ad group has 9 ad variations, each of which has received over 100 clicks and ~3,000+ impressions. I feel like this is a sufficient amount to draw a conclusion.

After looking at my ad variations more closely, I can see that the most effective ad variation is this:

Cheap Old Football Cards
Huge Selection! Old & New Cards
Call Toll Free: 1-888-440-9787
www.dacardworld.com/sports/

As I look down through the other 9 variations, I can see that the top three performing variations have the words “Huge Selection!” at the front of the first line, and “Call Toll Free:…” on the bottom line. I also see that two out of the three lowest performing variations do not have the toll free number on any line. I suppose I can recognize this and make a mental note of it but I cannot really make a reasonable determination as to why certain variations have lower CTRs. My reasoning for the variations in CTRs is that for whatever reason, words are slightly more readable in specific arrangements, and with specific punctuation.

I am going to delete any ad variation with a CTR lower than say 3% (2 variations). This action should filter more clicks through the remaining variations and thus speed up the next round of cuts. I’ll be sure to post again about how everything works out.

My conclusion is that since people browsing the internet have a microscopic attention span, being able to weed out the ad variations which may take .02 seconds longer to comprehend will ultimately give your PPC campaign the tiny edge against your less informed competitors which may (on a grander scale) make the difference between a successful and a very successful campaign.