Are You Testing Your B2B Google AdWords Campaigns Too Much? Or Not Enough?

Had an interesting conference call with one of my best clients this week. It’s a B2B niche high dollar technology play. The CMO has a strong interest in testing different ads, and ad copy in their Google AdWords campaigns. That’s great because I share those same desires! I love that stuff too. The challenge is the data points are coming in so slow. Even to get a valid test of two different sets of ad copy (the little ads that Google displays in the paid search results), you’d like to be getting at least 30-50, even a hundred clicks to get a statistically significant winner. But if you are just testing ad copy, what have you really learned? It’s not about getting people to just click, it’s about getting them to convert. And not just any people, the right people. The emerging craze in testing and optimization has many executives, managers, and their agencies asking the wrong questions, rushing to conclusions, often detrimental to the long term benefits of their pipeline.

How can this happen? Simple. Take two identical ads except one offers a free paper, the other a webinar. You throw 30 clicks through each ad. So what if one performs 20% better than the other? What if the next 30 clicks tell the complete opposite story?

Take it one level deeper.  Of those 30 clicks for each ad, twice as many people converted to the whitepaper than the webinar. We’re talking 6 people vs. 3! Not anything I’d want to put my job on the line for. Finally, it might take months if not years at that pace to determine with any certainty if whitepaper leads produce more pipeline dollars than the webinar.

Under pressure to test and improve “ROI” ; ) of search campaigns, we make premature, and often wrong adjustments based on too little data, and ask the wrong research questions.

This all gets back to one of my rally cries. If you are going to do paid search, don’t just dink around. Get all the budget you can, buy all the data you can and learn. Learn quickly. Of course you want to make sure your offer and landing pages are as good as they are reasonably going to be at the outset. Don’t worry about getting it perfect, the market will tell you what they want.