When formulating and instigating a paid search campaign, ensuring that all structural aspects of the initiative are optimised is integral to its overall success. It can be argued that achieving this involves evaluating and improving a number of different metrics, rather than one distinct area, in order to enhance your overall results.  This should include the creation of tight advertisements groups with targeted and precise ad text that is as close as possible to user intent, and quality score optimisation.

Such is the level of competition in the SEO world of today that it is no longer sufficient to simply analyse basic ad text reports produced by prominent software programmes such as Adwords or Bing Ads. Employing this strategy may be sufficient in order to make educated inferences about which ad text is performing well, which should be removed, and which should be paused, but it isolates advertisers from acquiring a comprehensive picture of their ad-texts effectiveness.

If you are someone who is currently working with other parties who still believe that solely using text reports from Adwords or other management tools is sufficient for analytic purposes, then you should stress to them that this tactic, coupled with basic landing page evaluation, will inhibit them from making the best possible modifications to their campaign as it progresses. This is because they will be making changes which are based on less than 50% of the information that they should and could be using, which could be hugely detrimental to their campaigns in the long-term.

Stage one: Is my Ad Text actually working?

The first thing you should consider when trying to optimally evaluate the performance of your Ad Text is test for the answer for a simple question; is the Ad Text on my pages actually working? The reality is that you can undergo the laborious process of obtaining a multitude of analytical information about your Ad Text, and acquire information about the number of clicks and impressions to reinforce this data, but the easiest way to evaluate how well your ad text is functioning is to simply attain an idea of how the users clicking on your targeted ads are converting on your site.

Many campaign managers have erroneously adopted the approach of focusing on the performance and results of different keywords when attempting to determine the performance of their CPA. However, it should be remembered that Ad Text plays a significant part in achieving a conversion from a site user, and as such should be given the appropriate recognition when it comes to your final CPA calculations.

At the end of the day, the most important metric in advertising is whether your site is effective at inducing conversions or not, and this can only be conclusively ascertained through detailed analysis of your ad text and your subsequent value judgement about whether it is ‘working’ and should be retained, or failing to make sales and should thus be changed.

Stage two: Look at user intent

When making the decision about which call-to-action to utilise or contemplating which landing pages you should use, it is imperative that you deeply research and consider the intent of your sites users.

Reoccurring purchase trends and key phrases that indicate where a user is when considering and contemplating product purchases can assist you to identify the nature of their intent and the specific ad text which they are looking at. Without attaining analytical insight in this area, you could be putting yourself at risk of misinterpreting other key pieces of information, such as the quantity of traffic being sent to specific landing pages.

If you were to solely analyse the performance of your ad text without first determining which of your targeted keywords are generating the most traffic, then you might be inclined to assume that too high a level of traffic is being sent to specific web pages. Looking at other areas such as the effectiveness of your deep linking strategy will ensure that you are given a more detailed idea of how and why your landing pages are performing well.

Stage three: Quality Scores

Focusing on optimising the quality score of your pages should be an integral component of your strategy when it comes to structuring your campaign. Ensuring that all the basic elements of optimising your score, such as checking whether your ad text are well-matched to the keywords you have chosen and the search queries you are targeting will improve your chances of attracting and encouraging users to click on your advertisement.

More often than not, optimising the quality score of your site landing pages will result in an improvement to other important metrics within your campaign, such as the click-through rate of your keywords, your impressions and your usability. It is important to remember that whilst your quality score shouldn’t be obsessed over, that nevertheless it should be heavily considered when making modifications to your campaign.