The following excerpt is from Perry Marshall, Mike Rhodes and Bryan Todd’s book Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes | IndieBound Let’s say the marketing department at Generico Housing Insurance, Inc. wants to build an ad campaign to promote its new insurance coverage for egg damage caused by bored teenagers. It’s decided to use the Googl Display Network (GDN) method to test its campaign. It creates two display ads. The copy in both is identical and only the images are different. Ad 1 shows a house being egged by teenagers. Ad 2 shows a pretty home with a nicely dressed, attractive family standing out front. The call to action in both is to click through to the website and request an insurance quote.
At first, Generico has no way of knowing which ad will generate more quotes. It doesn’t matter: Google will show the ads to a few thousand people, and within a week or two, there’s a clear winner. Generico now knows which image to use as it invests more advertising dollars in its website, GDN, print ads, business cards and even TV commercials.
This works because we’re measuring actual physical behavior in real time — not just verbal opinions. People are clicking their mouse and filling out forms . . . or failing to.
When they see the Generico ad online, they have no idea they’re participating in a split test. They’re simply responding based on whether the ad triggers them to want insurance or not.
GDN is never a branding exercise, and it’s never opinion polling. It’s observing your target market making live decisions and learning what excites their interest or leaves them cold.
Don’t waste thousands of dollars creating huge portfolios of advertising and marketing collateral. Spend just a few hundred dollars up front testing ads, and you’ll know which images, color schemes, headlines and calls to action give you the results you want.
“Test the forest” first
Our colleague David Bullock has given us a great verbal rule of thumb for…
