AB tests in Google Ads display advertising

AB tests in Google Ads display advertising

A/B testing is a very important part of producing good display ads. At the end of the day, you want your advertising campaign to be the best version of itself. But how do you know if the version you have published is the most attractive, creative and captivating?

Well, the only way to find out is to put some of your ideas in competition with A/B tests. And then, of course, analyze the results. Remember that although not all tests are successful, campaigns evaluated with A/B tests tend to perform better than those that do not.

However, until relatively recently, A/B testing of advertisements was a difficult and arduous task, and for some, it still is. A/B testing of banner ads can take days, if not weeks, and involve an entire team.

The many intuitive ways to use email or landing page A/B testing have yet to be adopted for most banners.

The old way of A/B testing

As an advertiser who wanted to do A/B testing, the challenge was quite high. If you wanted to change the text of one of your ads, you would have to go into the creative program and redo the entire banner. If you wanted to see which image worked best, guess what? You had to redo the entire poster and republish it.

Each time, this included coding, text scaling, and having to re-invest your money to get the campaign up and running, all in the hope that the modifications you had made would maintain the same standards as the old version.

After all, you had to send this new version to the editor, to publish it for a certain time and a maximum number of visits. And every time you expected that this new optimized version would work better than the first one. All this, of course, costs time and money, the truth was a lot of time and money wasted.

A/B testing

Now, let's take the example of a marketer changing an element of their display campaign to see if it has an impact on engagement. All the advertiser has to do is make changes to the text, call-to-action, or images if needed.

This ad update allows you to remove, replace, and save, all without having to contact your ad network or republish. The next step is to track the results and further optimize through analysis.

A/B testing and optimization

If you use a Google Ads specialist, you will be able to carry out several campaigns at the same time and analyze the results in real time. It's a simple and clear way to see which campaigns perform best.

Thanks to this work, you will be able to launch campaigns and analyze them at the same time. You can even give one or the other more weight based on the results, or choose how often you want to show each version of the ad.

As you will see, editing banners is currently extremely simple, however, you need to have some fundamental knowledge to be able to make the changes and that they are optimized.

So, it's time to reanalyze. Use the analytics provided by Google Ads to see how the changes you've made affect the performance of your campaigns.

When retargeting, apply A/B tests

A/B testing is also an important tool when it comes to retargeting. It's important to note that for retargeting, varying ads is more important than producing traditional targeted ads.

Many retargeters have verified this with data obtained from their clients' campaigns, assuring that performance decreases if the ads are not updated. According to this study, the click-through rate decreases by 50% after five months of using the same ads.

That's why it's imperative to use A/B testing to ensure your ads are always relevant and look their best. After all, conversions are the foundation of everything in retargeting.

What happens with the launch of an online marketing campaign

No matter what stage your campaign is in, use A/B testing to produce relevant ads. If you want to convert users, use A/B testing to find the ideal ad that will make it happen.

The fact is, building using A/B testing is the easiest way to produce ads and win all the rewards at the same time.

Advantages of retargeting

Using a retargeting strategy integrated with your Google Ads campaign brings many advantages to the marketing that you are developing around your web project. We all know that virtually all advertisers use these strategies to refine their results.

Retargeting is focused on the user's interest : Practically, it is very specific advertising to the user, taking into account their previous actions and facilitating the promotion of products or services in a super-reduced niche.

Facilitate purchases: Through retargeting you can remind your users that they have purchases to complete. Here the neuromarketing principle of buying impulse is fulfilled, the user can decide at that moment to end the purchase process.

Cross Selling benefits : If you have recurring users on your website, through retargeting you can offer products and services that are related to the product they already consumed. Thus, you will be able to diversify your customers' consumption options, making not just one but several sales.

They are permanent : As long as a user continues to visit your site, they will continue to see the products that they were about to purchase, but did not finish doing so. You can also propose others even of greater or lesser value that are related to the interest that the client has already shown.

Final recommendations

Ease of use should be a priority in A/B testing. It's a critical feature for advertisers today. This means that you can finally analyze, modify and maximize participation in each of your campaigns in a very simple way.