I woke up on Saturday morning at 6:40am with an idea for Google to implement into their AdWords interface. Earlier in the week we had been discussing display urls for text ads. Most advanced campaign managers would know that you can replace the “www” in a display url and replace it with basically anything else as long as the main domain is correct. For example www.videosoftware.com can become mp4.videosoftware.com. If a searcher enters a query such as “mp4 video converter” then the “mp4″ portion of the display url will be in bold, just adding an extra pop to the text ad.
The only problem with display urls is that you can only have one display url per ad group so you can’t test multiple display urls and find which will work best for the ad group over a single period of time. My 6:40am idea is to implement a test environment for text ads similar to Google’s Website Optimizer.
If you have not had any experience with GWO it basically allows you to test different elements of a web page. For example you may want to find out if a grey button works better than a blue button, a long form versus a short form, an additional paragraph, displaying a price point or no price and so on. GWO will test multiple elements at the same time, showing all combinations possible an equal number of times and then will report on which combination works the best and which element is involved the most in a successful goal conversion.
So instead of creating multiple ads, why not implement the ability to set up an ad with multiple headlines, descriptions and display urls to see which combination performs the best for the ad group and report on it? Perhaps not allow all elements to be tested (you would need a massive amount of traffic to get the best result) but at least allow us to test the headline and display url with one description. You can do it manually for a while but it becomes a tedious task.
Because competition is fierce for nearly all advertisers it is imperative to capture the searcher’s attention through creative ad copy if you can’t afford the top bid positions. The more relevant your ad looks to the particular query (through the words being highlighted in the ad copy) the more likely, in theory, the user is to click on your ad.
Multi-variant testing of Google Text Ads
