subject: Get The Most Out Of Pay-per-click Advertising By Taking Advantage Of Split Testing [print this page] A very powerful and effective online marketing strategy used by some of the top online pay-per-click advertisers is called split testing, and this article will explain what split testing is and why it is one of the most important steps for creating a profitable online advertising campaign. When you write a text ad that will be displayed in a search engine, you are only going to have a small number of characters on each line to work with, and therefore you will need to choose your words carefully. Given the limited amount of space that you are working with, the specific way that you phrase your words can have a big impact on whether people decide to click on it or not.
The idea behind split testing your text ads is that you rewrite or rephrase each version of your text ad that is promoting your link (even if this only means changing a single word) and then you track the performance of each ad to see which one gets the best results. By making small variations to the specific words or phrases that you use in each text ad, you can create several different versions of the same advertisement which are essentially the same but may have a very different performance with the people who are searching for your keywords.
A mistake that many people make when they are just getting started with search engine advertising or pay-per-click advertising is that they will only create one version of their text ad and then fund this ad with their full advertising a budget. A more advanced and more profitable technique is to take the time to write out ten different versions of your text ad using the same keywords and the limited number of characters that you have to work with, and then fund each of these ad campaigns with a limited budget to see which one performs the best.
Once you have performed this sort of a split test on the different versions of your ad that you would like to promote, you will have some very revealing data about how each one has performed such as the click-through rates, the cost-per-click for each ad, and the number of sign ups or sales that each one was able to generate. Once you can look at the numbers and see definitively which one has performed the best, you know that you have a winner and you can now put your full advertising budget into the highest performing ad in order to get the best possible return on investment for every advertising dollar spent.
