Creating an ad testing framework final

Editor's Notes

1. So why does creative matter? And why do you care? In a typical paid search account, you have your keywords, your bids, and your creative. We call these the 3 pillars of optimization. You choose your keywords based on your product or service, and strategize based on the number of search queries for that keyword. Typically your bid managers, such as Acquisio, will take care of segmenting your audience and reaching the right people at the right price. However, the final pillar, creative, is left to chance. We often spend so much time focusing on keywords and bids, that we forget about the actual messaging for the consumer. We are delivering messaging that is not right for the audience nor is it segmented to market to our customers.
2. Instead, this is what we want to attain – a highly optimized part of our search account that delivers messaging to our customers that actually resonates with them. Ad copy is the last mile of the marketing cloud and we should give it the attention it deserves.
3. This is your typical account. There are dozens if not hundreds of ad groups in your account. The long tail of your account is the majority of your ad groups. They probably make up about 10% of your revenue. This is the short tail of your account. It accounts for fewer ad groups, but makes up about 90% of the revenue in your account. By focusing on this portion of your account and ignoring the long tail, you might potentially be leaving money on the table. The main opportunity for you here is to focus on the long tail of the account to squeeze out incremental revenue across these ad groups. By constantly testing and optimizing your creative, you are gaining the competitive advantage by focusing on the ad groups that others are not, and generating ROI on your entire account. Ryan – frame this in the mind of an agency. For example, if your client makes $500M per year on paid search, they are missing out on $50M. This is a potential opportunity for you to use creative optimization to your advantage and generate extra revenue for your client. BTW – the blue in the middle signifies a “healthy” account, where you are optimizing across all ad groups.
4. So that brings us to testing your ads. Now that we have discussed the state of the industry, we can talk about how to test my ad creative and gain the competitive edge and generate up to 20% or more revenue on your paid search campaigns. A strong testing culture facilitates decisions based off of actual data rather than a “gut” feeling. While you can still take into account qualitative data, metrics reinforce these decisions. An example of a strong testing culture is Google – (speak to your experience there) The advent of increasingly sophisticated technology enables companies to track, measure and quantify virtually every aspect of their operations, giving rise to a culture of data-driven decision making. The greater the volume of data available, increasingly granular decisions can be made based on this information. Just as scientists rely on evidence to prove or disprove their theories, data-driven marketers rely on data to inform their decisions. The most successful companies realize that no detail is too small to be overlooked within a testing culture. Everything can be quantified, and evangelists of the testing culture know that basing business decisions on hard data is the only way to succeed in an increasingly volatile business environment.
5. So that brings us to testing your ads. Now that we have discussed the state of the industry, we can talk about how to test my ad creative and gain the competitive edge and generate up to 20% or more revenue on your paid search campaigns. A strong testing culture facilitates decisions based off of actual data rather than a “gut” feeling. While you can still take into account qualitative data, metrics reinforce these decisions. An example of a strong testing culture is Google – (speak to your experience there) The advent of increasingly sophisticated technology enables companies to track, measure and quantify virtually every aspect of their operations, giving rise to a culture of data-driven decision making. The greater the volume of data available, increasingly granular decisions can be made based on this information. Just as scientists rely on evidence to prove or disprove their theories, data-driven marketers rely on data to inform their decisions. The most successful companies realize that no detail is too small to be overlooked within a testing culture. Everything can be quantified, and evangelists of the testing culture know that basing business decisions on hard data is the only way to succeed in an increasingly volatile business environment.
6. So that brings us to testing your ads. Now that we have discussed the state of the industry, we can talk about how to test my ad creative and gain the competitive edge and generate up to 20% or more revenue on your paid search campaigns. A strong testing culture facilitates decisions based off of actual data rather than a “gut” feeling. While you can still take into account qualitative data, metrics reinforce these decisions. An example of a strong testing culture is Google – (speak to your experience there) The advent of increasingly sophisticated technology enables companies to track, measure and quantify virtually every aspect of their operations, giving rise to a culture of data-driven decision making. The greater the volume of data available, increasingly granular decisions can be made based on this information. Just as scientists rely on evidence to prove or disprove their theories, data-driven marketers rely on data to inform their decisions. The most successful companies realize that no detail is too small to be overlooked within a testing culture. Everything can be quantified, and evangelists of the testing culture know that basing business decisions on hard data is the only way to succeed in an increasingly volatile business environment.
7. Rinse and repeat constantly to achieve the best results
8. So how do we create a testing framework around the ad elements that we want to test? Let’s first examine the creative elements that you want to be optimizing in your paid search ads.
9. There are 10 creative elements to test in your paid search ads. The first element is specifics: this could be the SKU, different pricing, number of styles, anything that might draw the search user to the ad. Secondly, key difference within the ad matter. Ads are moving targets, so you need to make sure you are differentiating your messaging from one ad to the next (speak to ad fatigue here). The third element is the benefits of the product or service. Perry Marshall, author of “The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords” and the world’s most frequently quoted AdWords expert, recommends that ad copy should emphasize the benefits first. This is because, according to Perry, consumers don’t want to buy products or services – they want to solve problems. By highlighting the benefits of your product first, you can appeal to users’ emotions and offer them a way to solve their problem. When creating your ads, take into account features and benefits so that it can help you identify opportunities to highlight your products or service in a way that appeals to prospective customers, and craft a compelling call to action that will make them want to click your ad. Many advertisers overlook the importance of this stage in their eagerness to launch a campaign, but the more time you take to create strong PPC ads, the greater your CTR will be. The fourth is keyword alignment. Make sure your keywords align with your product or service, and are consistent with your landing page content. This requires a high level understanding of your consumers’ needs and wants. Fifth is the CTA. Prompting your potential customers to do something is essential – but so is differentiating your ads from the competition. One way to do this is by including unconventional calls to action. Too often, advertisers “ask for the sale” by using boring, unimaginative calls to action such as “buy now.” However, calls to action like this are all too familiar to consumers and rarely have the desired effect. Instead of using dry, bland sales talk, experiment with unusual calls to action that will capture your prospects’ attention and get them to click. • Highlight testimonials (“Read the rave reviews we got!”)• Be highly specific about cost savings (“Lower your costs by...”)• Make prospects use their imagination (“Imagine your wedding in...”) • Show off satisfied customers (“Jim Rice trusted us – see who else did”) • Include a bonus offer (“Plus Free Friendly Travel Advice!”) • Appeal to their impatience (“Get an Answer Right Now”) Special offers can offset seasonality issues. For example, a solid promotion around Christmas decorations in the summertime can generate extra revenue that you thought would be impossible to attain during this time. Seventh, risk mitigation can be tested, and not even if you own a business with high liability (ex: 30-Day Money Back Guarantee). Eighth you want to test synonyms within an ad to make sure that you’re not overusing cliché words or phrases. Punctuation is also an interesting element to test – we have seen exclamation points work really well with some of our clients’ ads. Lastly, the display URL should be tested to account for microsites or for tier 2 or tier 3 locations. Once you test one ad, you can then scale testing across all of your ad groups.
10. So how do you test ads at scale? Boost has a unique methodology that ensures stability across all ad groups. The good news is that this can be replicated with your own writers. You can write an ad, and submit that ad to a “contest” where you try and challenge that ad with your own writing. Therefore, you can only beat yourself one time – once 90% confidence is achieved you can declare a winner. Then you can see the incremental value achieved from each ad.
11. At Boost we use word bubbles to determine the word or words that is optimizing your creative. Lexical analysis allows you to visualize which words are having incremental impact on your CTR.
12. Like many marketing agencies, iProspect often finds itself under pressure to quickly produce hundreds or even thousands of ad creative ideas to support client promotions. But the reality is that it’s nearly impossible to churn out this volume of creative at high quality while managing all other aspects of multiple client engagements. This is especially true in an agency setting where in-house copywriting teams often gravitate to long-form, illustrious ads rather than short ad creative. Yet to be effective, promotional copy requires the same level of attention as longer-form ads. With Boost, this agency was able to have an endless stream of fresh ad creative for its client without putting a strain on agency resources. This agency was able to win more new Search business with an automated platform that could optimize ad creative. For their other retail client, this agency delivered a 399% increase on ROAS, which opened up the door for new business with that client.
13. Thanks for listening to my presentation. Don’t forget to download our whitepaper on the bit.ly here, which offers great tips for testing and optimization beyond what you saw here. You can come see me after the Q&A or contact me via email.
14. Q&A
15. Like most forms of digital advertising, display advertising allows us to make constant changes as we gain insight from the performance of the campaign. Yet, there’s a difference with display you can get more granular. The basics are – monitor, test, analyze, adjust You can run 2 different ads and then compare the results, but you could do the same kind of testing to evaluate the ad exchanges, size of creative, sites, etc.
16. These are the key areas we focus on: Our reporting makes all variables appear independent for ease of use. In reality, some variables in our reporting are highly correlated (site + supply vendor). NEED to keep this in mind
17. A very important lever for optimizing display campaigns is the frequency that our ads are being exposed to unique individuals and for how long after an event. Need to find the right combination between the number of ads shown per user and the recency (window of opportunity) - recency describes the opportunity window for marketers to connect to the customers. Look for patterns between early morning hours, working hours, and early evening
18.  We can bid higher on the most recent (and most valuable) cookies and bid lower as the cookie's life goes on, efficiently spending the budget as best as possible. Other companies bid evenly on all cookies, thereby not paying the optimum price for each individual cookie.
19. Finding more networks or publishers similar to the existing inventory that is working for us, and conversely, removing the networks and publishers that are not working for us is a crucial process  Below the fold placement is not something to fear. There’s a lot of very high quality BTF inventory. Strong performance on placements below the fold points to an engaged reader
20. mobile and tablet inventory – it’s much more likely to drive clicks than PC inventory Mac users tend to be younger, more tech savvy and could be more affluent users
21. Small Changes, Big Differences – Anything can dramatically affect test results, so avoid making too many adjustments at once Make sure your platform or Managed Service has granular bidding capabilities Something that you could see as an insignificant change can dramatically affect your test results. Avoid making too many adjustments at once Don’t underestimate the effects of small adjustments.  It’s not easy to manage cross-channel and cross-device campaigns. It takes a performance marketing expert to do so. Unless you’re one of those learn-the-hard-way kind of types, benefit from a fully managed service like ours. Managing display campaigns it’s not as simple as it appears