Quick question. Have you ever performed any tests to verify if there was any connection between Google Adwords and Google Organic? I've always heard there wasn't and it's obvious you don't have to pay for Adwords to get good organic listings on Google, but something I seen this month made me question if there is some connection.

I have a site that has ranked #5 organically for a dvd related term for several years. In addition to organic, I've always used Adwords to drive traffic to the site as well.

Last week, I increased my Adwords bid for this term to test a new landing page. Within a few days, my #5 listing shot to #1 and remained there for about a week. It eventually settled back down to #5 where it had previously been.

Coincidence or is there some relation between the two?

Thanks,

Brent Crouch

You forgot to reply to my question (about 7 posts up). Can you give it a try?

Thanks,
Peter

It wasn't until the last post of this gigantic page that I understood the value of this test. Your two paragraphs summed up the whole dang thing.

I had a few ads that were getting a great CTR and were converting very well. I stopped testing them because I didn't want to waste 50% of my impressions on an ad that had a small chance of beating my control.

This strategy lets me control what percentage of my impressions I use to test an ad that will probably not beat my control. Sure, I could split the impressions 50% control and 50% test ad and get quicker results, but why waste 50% of my impressions and potential profits on an ad with no history.

You keep doing that then.

Dan, maybe the PPC Fast Start will answer this but I've been thinking long and hard about your advice for starting new AdWords campaigns, using exact match, and I just can't seem to completely get my head round it.

You say that you use exact match until you find profitable keywords but if you start so focused how do you know what people are searching for? I can only imagine that your keyword list is really, really long to account for every combination of keyword on the off-chance that some will prove profitable. I'm sure you use a few tools (AdWords keyword tool, etc) first to find some ideas, so is that how you go about it?

I'm aware that if you start with phrase match you should really know which negative keywords to include, and that broad match can cost you in wasted clicks, but am I missing some fundamental point about exact match that I've not just covered? There are so many opinions out there on how to start new campaigns…

Many thanks.

I go through my PPC accounts every two weeks to monitor performance and setup new test ads. I've been at this for a few years now, so I've come up with some pretty good control ads.

This weekend I was considering not even testing anymore ads in the account. Like you said, most of the time the test ad will not beat the control and I have found I am loosing clicks/conversions to these tests.

I was curious to see if there was a solution and have been searching for the last few hours on different testing techniques. I finally made it to your post and it makes more sense that anything I've seen. It's a great idea.

See ya. I've got work to do!

Great post, but I'm having some problems with split testing. I recently did a split test with 1 original add, 2 copies of the original, and 1 new ad I wanted to improve.

Worked great! My new copy doubled the CTR, from 2.25% to 4.5%. So I paused the original and its 2 copies and left the new ad run on its own.

That was a bad choice. Positions dropped a bit and CTR to 0 (after over 600 impressions.)

When I switched the other ads on again, the clicks started again too,.. also on the new ad.

Is the history of the ads some kind of average of all active ads? What's your experience?

Thanks,
Peter