Why you need a guide to split testing copy? Because your copy can -and will- make or break your PPC campaigns.

Sure, the images and videos can grab attention and even pique interest, but it’s going to be the copy that tells users why they should click or convert.

So you can bet that your Ad copy is what will determine whether they do or not.

What is Ads A/B testing or Ads experiments?

Ads feature Campaign Drafts & Experiments will be referred here as AdWords Experiments. It lets you mirror your campaign’s set up and make changes to it without impacting the original campaign performance.

The first step is to create a draft which can either be applied to the original campaign or activated as an Experiment. If a draft is run as an Experiment, then it will test the changes made to your campaign and compare its performance with the original campaign over time.

Ideas for AdWords A/B testing

The possibilities for testing are endless, but here we will unfold a couple of ideas that you can act upon:

Bidding Strategy

You might want to use a different bidding strategy to test how the change impacts your campaign performance. Altering your bids is one objective that can be met with split testing.

For instance, you might want to see if decreasing your bids will still drive sufficient traffic, but before using the new bid, you would want to test if that would work without disrupting the correct traction being generated.

Ad Copy

You might want to test an entire new ad copy to figure out if it connects more with your audience.

Alternately you might also want to test out different CTAs in your ad messaging to analyze which would impact more.

Landing Page

If you have two landing pages that can be linked to an ad, you might want to check which one to use.

For instance, there might be a pricing page of your product and a sign up page, you would eventually want a user to reach the sign up page, but you also know that a user might be interested in viewing your pricing structure before making that decision.

Negative Keywords

Adding some keywords you deem as irrelevant might lead to a drastic shift in the impressions and clicks received. Before adding a certain keyword as negative keyword you might want to check how it impacts the campaign performance. This can again be tested with A/B testing feature of AdWords.

Short conclusion

One word of caution, however, to those who may be tempted to embrace experiments a bit too readily: only one experiment can run per campaign at any given time.

This means that campaigns running ad copy tests cannot simultaneously test smart bidding strategies, bid modifiers, custom audience targeting, etc.

It is important to keep that limitation in mind as you plan and schedule various tests to run.