Easiest Way to Split Test PPC Landing Pages in Adwords

(Taken from my answer to a question on Linkedin)

I have done 100′s of landing page split tests in Google Adwords over the years – so here is how I do it if I don’t have IT resources in order to set up a test with testing software.

First, if your goal is to see which converts better based on your Google conversion numbers within Adwords than its pretty straightforward to read results. If you are going to have to put back end results to it then you will just need to do some additional work with a spreadsheet or calculator (from simple to complex depending on your sales cycle or conversion $ values, LTV etc.)

So here is how you would ideally do it:

You need to duplicate your ads, one with each of the URL’s (since your A/B testing landing pages you need to keep the ad copy the same so that copy variable isn’t interfering in the results).

Don’t use any existing ads for the test as there are slight indications that past performance of an existing ad could get some favoritism within the Adwords platform. So pause the existing ads in the Adgroup (only need to pause if its going to one of the URL’s you are testing), and launch new versions (they can have the same copy as the one that was running).

Launch the ads together and keep an eye on it until you see statistical significance within the results. I have seen in odd occasions that the same exact ad copy within the Adgroup is getting a entirely different CTR than its duplicate ad after a period of time where the conversion results were statistically significant (using fixed headline not keyword inclusion) which has cause me concern since they should be approximately the same. In this case I have terminated the test and restarted – but this has only happened less than a handful of times over the past years.

If you have some IT resources or can access the server yourself to add code to pages you can use Experiments/ Website Optimizer to run the test and alert you to statistical significance, however you still need to set up the front of the test of the ad traffic split.

Also, make sure that in Adwords that you set up the ads to rotate evenly if you are looking for a 50/50 split of the traffic between the two ads.