October 8, 2021
The Ideal QA Process in Digital Advertising
Ad copy testing is something that every digital marketer knows that they need to include in their strategy, but it can be very hard to determine where to start. There are so many directions that you can choose to go with an ad copy test that it can be easy to get caught up in decision fatigue and end up keeping the same ad copy running.
While the choices for testing ad copy are numerous, it’s better to keep things simple and actually start testing versus letting these efforts sit on the ‘to-do’ list. A great way to start testing ad variations in copy is to run a split test by creating ad variations that use title case vs sentence case.
Title Case vs Sentence Case When Running Ad Tests
In the most basic sense of the term, title case refers to the practice of capitalizing every word or every proper noun in the headlines of a search ad. An example of this would be:
Using sentence case in ad copy follows the same rules you would use when writing an email (or a blog post). When using sentence case, you’ll capitalize the first word in each headline, like the example below:
Creating and Running a Controlled Test
When creating a controlled test, it’s important to follow a few basic rules of thumb. The first rule being that it’s imperative to test a controlled variable in the experiment. For example, if you were to run a test between two search ads that have different text for each headline, and different copy below the headlines, it becomes very difficult to determine if the reason behind why one ad was more successful than the other was the headlines or the description lines.
Instead test an isolated variable. For example, duplicating the ad so that the headlines text and ad copy text remain the same, and then using the original version as the control ad and then use sentence case for the titles of the variable ad (the ad that was copied).
After you have your ads set up, it’s important to allow each ad variation to get enough data to determine a clear winner.
How to Determine Success
When it comes to determining a clear winner in the test, the best metrics to use when testing the same ad copy in both variants will be click-through-rate. While the end-goal of your campaigns may be increasing conversions, the goal when testing sentence vs title case is to determine how you can get the greatest amount of users to interact with an ad and get them to the site, giving them a chance to convert on any given landing page.
In order to allow each variant to get enough volume in the test, ensuring that your ad rotation settings are set to rotate-indefinitely will tell Google to continuously rotate these ads when they are triggered by a search query on the platform.
Start by allowing these variations to run for a 2-3 week period before determining a winner. Once you have determined that, then it’s important to continuously test ad copy. Each test that you run will allow you to get closer and closer to showing the most relevant ad to a user that will lead to higher and higher CTR’s. While any given test may not produce the desired results, it’s always better to continuously test, learn, and then test again!
