Intergration

One of the fundamental tenets of running a successful PPC campaign is to try and improve Click Through Rate (CTR) – that is, if a higher CTR is one of your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), of course.

So it was interesting to review a split test pair of ads recently where there was a clear winner in terms of higher CTR – 7.1% versus 4.3% – which would ordinarily have resulted in the ad with the lower CTR being Paused and replaced with a new one, in a process of “beat the control”.

However, this particular pair of ads had been set up purely to measure the success of different landing pages, and both featured exactly the same text, capitalisation, Display URL etc.

So what was it about one of the ads that was attracting such a different CTR than the other? Interestingly, I don’t actually know.

But it certainly highlights an issue that is often overlooked when analysing PPC data – sometimes, things just happen without any specific explanation being able to cover it adequately. I’d certainly suggest that these random anomalies are few and far between, but they are certainly there and can serve to skew results in specific aspects of a PPC campaign, without being able to be identified and altered satisfactorily.

What needs to happen, of course, is a longer term view being taken. Which is exactly what happened with the pair of ads reffered to above, as over time, their respective CTR’s got closer together and have stayed pretty similar since then.

Shows the advantage of a broader perspective, rather than jumping on every minute detail, when it comes to focusing on what’s really important – achieving your business goals, rather than simply improving irrelevant stats.