With a PPC text ad, 4 lines are all you get to make your impression. Yet most people give little thought to the display URL, which is 25% of your ad’s real estate. The display URL should be a major concern when writing your ad. I would venture to say that it’s more important that your description even.

Buy a new domain:
This is one place not to cheap out and try to save a few bucks by using a bad domain name. Go ahead and register a new one, or even multiple new ones to test a new offer. Using an old domain that you had lying around, that kind of fits the offer is a recipe for failure. Besides, 1 conversion could recoup the domain cost for a year.

Buy a good domain:
For some reason I don’t have any trouble finding good domains. I never buy .NETs or .ORGs, only .COMS. I hardly ever use hyphens or weird punctuation either. Remember, you are buying the domain to instill confidence in the searcher, not for SEO purposes. Obviously, the shorter the better, but multiple related words are better than punctuation I find.

Test display URLs

I like to run multiple ad copies in Google with the only difference being the display URLs. I have seen big changes in CTR from various URLs tested. Once you find the best converting URL you can switch everything over to that URL.

It’s been said a million times before, you need to keep testing in affiliate marketing. You just never know what may or may not work until you actually commit some money to testing. We’ve all heard it before, but here’s an interesting case in point.

I was testing a campaign that has been running on Google for about 8 months now, just chugging along. I had 5 ads that I was testing for a particular Adgroup, and in one ad I noticed that I had accidentally left out a word in the description that made it read like total nonsense. It had ran that way for about 2 weeks and the funny thing is, that ad performed about 23% better than the other ads. I have no explanation for why that is, but you can bet I left that messed up ad in place

When you are running a long term PPC campaign, ongoing testing is key. The hard part is to continue testing, even when you have an established and well running campaign. It’s easy to sit back and be satisfied with your ROI, but how do you know you aren’t leaving money on the table unless you continue to test? That’s what takes discipline, and if you have it you can separate yourself from the rest of you competitors.

This brings me to a task that I have started calling “pruning the trees”. I have this mental image of adgroups as branches on a tree, with the top performing ad texts as healthy branches shooting up. The bad performing ads are kind of scraggly branches growing off to the side. So just like if you want to keep a tree growing up, you have to prune off these side branches to let the good one keep growing up.

So for example, say you have an adgroup with 2 very strong ads pulling around 5% CTRs. Start throwing ads in there daily and let them run for a few days. Once you have this cycle going for a while, you can go in and prune out the bad ones, keeping the top ads in place. This will create a constant upward growth pressure on your adgroups. You are looking for that new ad that just may end up beating your top performers.

It’s important to note that by testing, you are going to use up some impressions on low performing ads, which would have otherwise gone to your top performers. That’s the cost of testing, but the rewards can exceed that cost if you hit on a great new ad copy.

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