Internet Marketing Tips - Pay Per Click Split Testing Tips

Pay per click advertising is one of the greatest things that was ever created. You only pay for your ads if people click on them. How fantastic is that? And the basics of pay per click are very simple. Anybody can get up and running in no time at all. If you're already using it then you know how true that is. What you may not already know are ways to take your campaigns to the next level and make them even more profitable. That's where this article comes in.

By now you probably already know how to construct a decent pay per click ad. It's not easy to do when they only give you three lines to work with. As an experienced copywriter, used to writing 20 page sales letters, this was one of my biggest obstacles with this form of promotion. It took me a while to get the hang of the three line ad. Eventually, I realized that it wasn't much different from writing a sales letter. Essentially, you were focusing on your headline, your main benefit and your closing. Once I figured that out, the rest was a piece of cake.

But then I wanted to take those ads to the next level...by split testing them, just like I would a headline on a sales page. With pay per click, you always want to have one ad that is your control ad and then at least one ad to test against it. The ad that wins the test, as in which one gets the highest CTR, that ad becomes the new control ad. The question is, how DO you split test? I'm not talking about the technical part of setting up the ad. Anybody can do that. I'm talking about what you want to look for when split testing. Do you want to do a narrow split test or a wide one? What's the difference?

A wide split test would be testing one ad that is almost completely different from the control ad. There are almost no similarities between the two ads. Usually you will do wide split tests at the beginning because you want to find out what the best overall ad strategy is.

A narrow split test would be only making a slight change in the one ad. The change could be as simple as putting an exclamation point at the end of the line of one ad and leaving it off the other ad. It could be as simple as using www in the URL in one ad and leaving it out in the other. Yes, sometimes a subtle change like that can increase or decrease conversions.

The key to split testing is to start wide (completely different ads) and then work your way to narrow modifications. Eventually, you'll come up with the optimal ad for your product. Of course that's until the ad becomes so old that it loses its effectiveness altogether.

But that's a topic for another time.

To YOUR Success,

By Steven Wagenheim