I recommend you disable Google AdWords automatic ad optimization.

Why? Because Google will display those ads with the highest CTR most often and not the ads with the highest ROI.

You don’t want your ads to be optimized for CTR but for ROI.

You could have an ad with a staggering CTR but with a lousy ROI – thousands of people might click on your ad, but no one might signup or buy from you. And that’s not good at all – you spend a lot of money without getting anything back.

Pay Per Click is a lot about testing and tracking… and that’s exactly what you should do. Continuously split test your ads to find the real winners, those with the best conversion and highest ROI and don’t let Google decide which ones are the big hitters.

There is another reason why you shouldn’t use automatic ad optimization:

You won’t get accurate results with your split tests. For example, when split testing ad A against ad B, ad A might get displayed 75% of the time (because Google says that’s our winner) while ad B shows up only 25% of the time. That way it’s impossible to get statistically exact results – both ads need to get displayed equally often to find out which one converts better.

Technorati Tags: ppc, adwords, ad optimization, split testing, ctr, roi, pay per click

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Google AdWords. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.