Since I’ve gone for a litany of health-related tests lately including my first endoscopy, I thought it would be a good idea to conjure up some thoughts on how to effectively run tests in a paid search campaign. Here are a few steps on how I go about testing and getting the results/insights needed to prove whether a test passed or failed.

1) Don’t fall off the wagon – What I am saying here is don’t forget what got you to where you are, as in standard practices. An optimization should not be applied to the whole account until it is tested and proven true. The proper practice is to test a few keywords or small ad groups until you have sufficient data to justify larger changes. Of course you will need to take into account the current performance of the campaigns, because if your account is really performing poorly, you may have to take bigger action sooner than later, and that’s understandable.

2) Don’t test too many variables at once – If you are testing too many things at once, there is a good chance that the tests can start affecting each other. That would obviously put a hindrance on the true results. Don’t change too many bids, ads, keywords, match types, negatives, etc. at the same time or you’ll never know what worked. Try changing one or two things at a time and see what happens.

3) Give your tests enough time to gather results – This is my favorite rule of them all…Probably the biggest mistake I see with amateurs is that they set up a test and if it doesn’t immediately get the results they were looking for, they pull the plug and it’s lights out for the test. I can’t stress how important it is to give your tests enough time. Every advertiser/client wants results, but they need to understand, when testing, that you need time to gather the results to give them the insights they are looking for. You’ll learn from experience just how long you need to let each test run, but I’d say  two weeks for small changes and up to a month or more for larger  tests.

4) Understand the context of your test - There are many, many variables that affect your PPC accounts outside of what is in your control. The state of economy, the time of year/season and many other factors make worlds of difference. Using an example, if you sell Halloween masks online and begin testing your paid search in November and December, there’s a good chance you’re going to see a drop in sales in that data that had nothing to do with your paid search tests. The key here is to understand how the parts of your account would have normally performed before starting your test. That way you can compare your metrics against those benchmarks. Sometimes it’s even better to look at “last year at this time” numbers rather than data from the last few months.

5) Use technology – There are testing tools available both within AdWords and from third party vendors that can really help you implement and analyze your tests.