From the SMX West Conference in San Jose, California, March 21-23, 2017. SESSION: Thinking Outside The SEM Box. PRESENTATION: Using Experiments to Get Crazy(ier) But Still Be In Control - Given by Susan Wenograd, @susanedub - Five Mill Inc., Partner & SEM Manager. #SMX #11B

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Using
Experiments to
Get Crazy(ier) But
Still Be In Control

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Hi! I’m Susan and I’m a paid media nerd.
About me

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SEM and Social Ads Nerd at Five
Mill, managing multiple six figures in
spend per month.
Paid media for the past 10 years
(good grief, seriously?)
Live in Virginia with some very cute
people.
About me

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Someone says, “We should test this.”
Someone else involved usually reacts like this:
Testing can cause anxiety…

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What if you could test in a less scary way? (You can!)

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Duplicate
Test
Rejoice
Using Drafts & Experiments

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Using Drafts & Experiments
Click into a campaign and create a draft
Use a descriptive title to
make things easier later.

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Edit your draft….
Note that performance data carries from source

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Side note about Drafts…
 Work “in-progress” outside
of AdWords Editor
 Easy to QA/Share with
team/client

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Time to make your changes…
 Edit the draft for your test - Campaign settings alone are a
huge area of potential tests!
Don’t forget to add any
necessary internal tracking
used for this separate
segment!

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Apply the changes and kick it off

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Choose your dates & percentages
 Be clear about what you are testing
 Name so it makes sense (especially
if you do a lot of them)
 Choose your dates
– Think ahead for stat sig amounts
– Choose your traffic split (minimize risk
with smaller %)

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Where to find it once it’s live…

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Where to find it once it’s live…
Experiment-level data will populate in the Experiment view, but show
separately in account totals:

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Understanding your results…
 All metrics for the experiment are available in normal data when in the experiment view
 Icons helpfully indicate what is stat sig and not (breakout on the next slide)
 Specific experiment data appears below this table in a normal Ad Group/Keywords, etc view

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Understanding your results…

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Example outcome…
Five Mill Bidding Platform vs. GoogleCPA Bidding:
– Google’s CPA 86% higher
– Google’s conv rate 30% lower
– Our tool had +30% margins (147% ROAS), Googles tool had -25% margins (75% ROAS) – our ROAS
is 200% better
– Google sent 80 questionably incremental converted clicks at an additional cost of 2217eu, making
the CPA on those incremental conversions 27.70 which is 4x our CPA target for this campaign.
***TOTALLY DEPENDSONTHE QUALITYOFYOURCPC BIDS/PLATFORM/STRATEGYP

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Another example outcome…
“We want to try a new landing page.”
 Unlike rotating ad versions, this gives us complete control over traffic flow
 Early on, but already seeing reassurance our original landing page was spot-on.

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What else?
You can’t test some automated bid strategies (Booooooooo)
 Target search page location
 Target ROAS
 Target outranking share
If your Experiment does better, you can convert it into a “normal” campaign!

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Duplicate
Test
Rejoice
…Now it’s your turn! Go!
Remember, three easy steps…

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LEARN MORE: UPCOMING @SMX EVENTS
THANK YOU!
SEE YOU AT THE NEXT #SMX