ACE—Split testing is not just for landing pages anymore
Imagine if you could apply split testing experiments to your paid search campaigns in the same way you use them for landing pages. Last week Google made this dream a reality with the announcement of ACE—Adwords Campaign Experiment. This tool is still in Beta form, but if you’re like me you can’t wait to try what Google has come out with next. And with the information that this tool provides, ACE is worth trying while in Beta.
Before this tool was announced, the only way to measure the success of a paid search campaign was by sorting through and comparing metrics like traffic, average CPC, and spend. If you wanted to make changes to an ad, you had to add or remove words in the ad, change keyword match type or change your campaign structure without any hard data to backup your motivation for the changes. Anyone who has done any kind of split testing before knows that changes made in succession are almost like flying blind since there are too many unknown variables that can change the effectiveness of a campaign.
ACE now offers the ability to make your changes concurrently, through experiments, which will provide much more accurate results regarding the effectiveness of the paid search campaign. Like other Google split testing you will have your control (existing campaign) and your experiment (new campaign). Although the most accurate data will come from a 1:1 experiment (50 percent of traffic goes to the old campaign and 50 percent goes to the new campaign), ACE gives you the ability to dictate what percent of traffic goes to which ad campaign.
Since a significant change in one ad’s performance is unlikely to happen by chance when two versions of the ad are run simultaneously, you can make much more accurate updates to your campaign with confidence in a way that was not possible before.
If you would like to learn more about this new feature from Google, check out the video tutorial series or sign up for the public Beta (US only).
Search giant Google has officially launched it’s new search index called Caffeine. Which is perhaps a very appropriate name considering it updates Google’s search index 50% faster than previous efforts. When we use Google to search for anything on the internet, we are not actually presented with the most recent information, instead we are presented with a history of the web that is stored in Google’s index. Previously this index was updated about twice a month which was, for all intents and purposes, fast enough. However, as the web continues to expand exponentially and content is updated more and more frequently, this time frame does not match the immediacy necessary for finding information.
Personal branding and online reputation management are important aspects to helping build your company and its internet presence. Having many social media profiles for your company, whether it be Facebook or Twitter, and having them all linked together for increased automation will also help build customer relationships. Utilizing these social profiles to create an online personality for your company that people can connect with will give you that extra advantage over your competitors and help build trust.
