In order to continually improve your PPC campaigns, you should always have multiple ads running against each other so that you can test which one is the most effective and adjust accordingly. One of the elements that reduces your cost per click and improves the positioning of your ad is your Click Through Rate(CTR). Click through rate is simple the number of times that your ad is shown(impressions) divided by the number of times a searcher clicked on your ads(click). The higher you can improve CTR, the overall improvement of your pricing and positioning.
One of the methods to improve CTR is to split test your ads and make small incremental changes to improve your CTR over time. While a lot of attention is focused on keywords and bid prices, ad copy is one element that is often neglected, but can have the same positive impact as all other elements. Small differences such as a change of a word or different punctuation have proven to have a significant impact for CTR.
To continually improve my ad copy performance, I use a program called Winner Alert. Winner Alert is simply a program that send you a report on a daily basis that identifies which ad copy is performing best for each of your ad groups. Winner Alert determines a winner after there have been a enough clicks to determine which ad is receiving a higher click through rate. This gives you a daily report that you can quickly login and make changes to your ads that are determined the loser. Using Winner Alert keeps ad copy at the top of your radar and will improve your overall campaign performance over time.
Setup of Winner Alert is easy. It requires that you setup a report to run daily in XML format, that is sent to an e-mail address that is specified in your account setup, so that they can monitor your account on a daily basis and send you a report. In order to get the most out of Winner Alert, your ppc campaigns need to be set to “run ads evenly.” If your campaign is set to run the best performing ad, then what I have found is that the new ads typically do not receive enough clicks to determine winners very quickly. When ads run evenly, the traffic is split to 50% and helps to improve ad performance much more quickly.
The only negative for Winner Alert from my perspective is the ability to change how frequently I want to receive the report. The option of receiving the report every other day or every third day would be plenty because depending on the size of the account and the number of clicks involved, most ad groups will not have a winner selected everyday or even every few days. This is more of a desire of mine, then a true need for the program. Besides that, Winner Alert has truly been helpful in improving campaign performance, but also not allowing ad copy to get lost in the many other tasks of managing campaigns. The cost is $19.95 for as many accounts as you have, therefore a small price to pay and one that should easily pay for itself with reduced click prices and improved performance.
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Good solid information..thanks.