Ad Variations

How do Ad Variations Work?

Ad variations are basically ad testing at scale, meaning you can quickly and effectively test changes across large scale campaigns and Google will inform you of the results once there is a significant pool of data. 

With this data, you can then execute changes across your ad campaigns in line with Google’s insights. 

For example, you can modify the headline or include a different set of keywords to see how it impacts your ad campaign. Or, you could vary the CTA and test how well your ads perform with the change across multiple campaigns.

Why are Ad Variations Important? 

Ad variations are important to the success of your ad campaigns for a number of reasons. 

1. Improve Performance

Ad variations help you uncover what works in ad campaigns. They can reveal how the newly modified ads perform compared to the originals.

2. Lower Your CPC

Testing your ad campaigns and figuring out which version increases CTR will improve your quality score and lower your CPC which means you can stretch your ad budget further and run more ads.

3. Increase Conversions

Trialling ad copy helps you discover more compelling language to use across your landing pages which can result in more conversions. 

When to use Ad Variations 

Use ad variations when you want to test one change across several ad campaigns or your whole account. 

If you need to make multiple smaller changes to your ads simultaneously, it’s best to use Campaign Drafts and Experiments. 

Campaign drafts allow you to prepare multiple changes to an ad campaign without impacting its performance. This is best if you want to revise your ad strategy and create drafts to show this. 

Once you’ve completed a draft instead of implementing these changes in your original ad campaign you can turn your draft into an experiment. You can then run your experiment and determine how long you’d like it to run and how much of your initial budget you’d like to use. 

How do you Implement Ad Variations?  

1. To begin an ad variation, first select a scope (specific campaigns, the entire account or something custom). 
   

2. Create a ‘variation’.  For example, you may change your CTA from ‘buy now’ to ‘buy today’. 
   

3. Select the other variation details like the end date of the variation test and choose what percentage of traffic to show the altered ads. 
   

4. Following the campaign end date, you’ll be able to see the overall ad variation results and determine how the modified ads perform in comparison to the original versions. 
   

5. Depending on the overall results of the modified versions, choose to replace existing versions of the ads or create new ad campaigns incorporating the variations. 

How Can We Help? 

Struggling with your Google ads strategy and need someone to help? You should get in touch and we’ll book you in for a free strategy consultation. 
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