Maintaining PPC Test Validity

Testing PPC ads is a significant part of pay per click management and yet it can be a little confusing at times. What should you be testing and what actually determines a valid test? Are there factors that cannot be tested but could potentially affect performance? To ensure the best possible results test have to be planned out and there must be a knowledge and understanding of all the other elements that could affect your results but cannot be monitored.

You can raise the validity of a PPC test and there are many changes that can be made based on the data returned from campaign tests but there will always be those occasions when tweaks made on the basis of statistics returned reap completely unanticipated performance results. These ‘WHAT?!’ moments when a campaign either soars or crash dives following amendments made on the basis of concentrated analysis may have been caused by outside factors. The question is can they be controlled? This is a question that cannot be answered definitively but by understanding what those factors are we can respond quickly and effectively when things don’t go to plan. We can even avoid those nasty surprises.

There are general things you can do to improve validity such as ensuring you test for up to 1,000 impressions before making changes. However the best way of ensuring statistical validity is to use an analysis tool. For the human eye and brain it can be a tall order to look at results and estimate whether the performance has been affected so use the wide range of tool available.

At www.clickconsult.com we offer expert pay per click management including campaign testing and analysis.