For not much cost or time, you can run tests in Adwords and quickly receive feedback on a number of different advertising elements. Some of the elements you can test include:
- Price: you probably have multiple price points for your products and services. Run one ad featuring your low price point, and another with a higher price point, but maybe with more services. I recently split test an ad for a client in retail at two different price points, one at their lowest price, and another ad with a 50% higher price but with more services. The lower price point received 50% fewer clicks–a dramatic decrease.
- Discount vs. Price: Will your customers respond better to a price, or a percentage discount? Run identical ads and show one with a percentage discount, and the other with the markdown price.
- Offers: will your customers respond better to “free shipping”, or “10% off if you buy today.”
- Content/Message/Copy: overall you can split test different copy and messaging to understand better what resonates with your customers.
My recommendation is to run two ads simultaneously varying only one element, for example two different price points, or price versus discount offered. You can split test more than 2 ads at a time, but if you don’t have a lot of traffic it will take longer to collect statistically significant data, which brings up the final point in this conversation–statistical significance. Your tests need to run long enough to collect enough data to be considered conclusive. Here’s a site that you can use to enter the information about your test to help you determine which ad is the winner. As a final note, whichtestwon.com is a great site that shows different results for web pages tested in a similar manner as above.
Let me know how your tests went?
