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I got a little lazy the other day, while going through an Adwords account that I am managing, and rather than write a new ad to compete with the winner of a split-test… I paused it; and a funny thing happened… the minimum bid ticked down from 3 cents to 2.

The CTR on the winner was 21% and the loser almost 15%, so I was a little surprised that this dropped the minimum by over 30%. So, it go me thinking. Certainly the CTR is high enough to justify a low minimum bid but there have been times when the CTR has been higher than it is now and the minimum bid did not change. So, why now?

I think I figured it out. The winning ad’s copy is a paraphrase of the landing page’s headline. The ad that was paused also reiterated copy from the landing page… but that copy is in an image and appears further down on the page. I think there is something to be learned there.

Although, I have paused the split-test, this is a powerful testimony to what can be accomplished using the technique. The winning ad was put together quickly; written only to serve as the sacrificial lamb to the ad that I had painstakingly composed… or so I thought. Because of it however, we are now enjoying a fifth of the traffic to a keyphrase that when converts can produce revenue deep into the 5 digit range… and paying nearly half of what we initially bid for a click.

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With the upcoming change to Google’s display URL policy on redirects, I have been rewriting my PPC ads. I have had a difficult time defeating the click-through rates of the display url: www.geocategory.com, that is re-directing to the website. I got a number of good ideas from a question I asked on Gooruze, including:

Both of these suggestion helped maintain a good quality score and .04 cent minimum bids, but in limited testing I was not able to beat the CTR of the redirected URL. I will continue to experiment with them.

But if at first you don’t succeed… try, try, again. I finally found an ad that has showed some promise and early in the test is defeating the www.geocategory.com set up… and it uses the original domain, which is even better. What I did was add the geography and the telephone number to the 3rd line of the ad. I tried to make it look like an in-column yellow page ad. The 3rd line reads: Fillintheblank County… (123)456-7890. I was surprised that Google allowed telephone numbers in their ads but I now understand why they do… they are good for click-thru rates! Google will allow 3 consecutive periods but not 4… between the geography and the number.

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