Why You Need to Test Your Adverts

February 5, 2009 by Butterfly Filed under: PPC

In his famous book Scientific Advertising, Claude C. Hopkins notes “The time has come when advertising has in some hands reached the state of a science. It is based on fixed principles and is reasonably exact. The causes and effect have been analyzed until they are well understood. The correct methods of procedures have been proved and established. We know what is most effective and we act on the basic law. Adverting, once a gamble has thus become, under able direction, one of the safest business ventures” And probably nothing proves this better than Google Cash method often mentioned here.

Decades of testing particularly in the mail order business has birthed proven principles; methods of selling that are invariably superior. So the question begs, why test if this matter is fairly set on stone. The truth is in spite of employing the best of selling principles in an advertisement piece; it does not guarantee that the campaign will fly. It can bomb, but this should never be because one flouted principles. Hopkins’ genius elaborates “Now the only uncertainty pertains to people and to products, not to methods. It is hard to measure human idiosyncrasies, the preferences, the prejudices, the likes and dislikes that exist. We cannot say that an article will be popular, but we know how to sell it in the most effective way;loses when they occur are but trifling, and the causes are factors which have nothing to do with advertising”

It is this human and product factors that necessitate testing. Testing brings to the surface what is of primary interest to a market to allow an advertiser to exploit it for sales. For example a product for losing weight could have several benefits. It may lead to weight loss fast, it may be easy to use, it may result to permanent results and it may also be healthy. As a purveyor of health products you may be inclined to think that the latter two benefits are the strongest. Yet fast and easy weight loss often carries the day in the weight loss market. So when crafting sales messages for this market it’s often wise to emphasize the speed and ease of the product. Testing is based on the fact that you are not your own customer. This is often a lesson that will be learnt painfully and expensively if you do not test.

Let’s look at some real life examples. The following excerpts are from a PPC ad; “Kids Develop Learning Skills in a Fun Filled Learning Environment” and “Kids Develop Learning, Listening and Communication Skills in Active Camp”. These ads were tested by Perry Marshall with similar headlines and URLs. The first ad had a Click Through Rate (CTR) of 0.5% while the second was 2.0%, outdoing the first by 400%.in response. A seasoned eye may attribute specificity of the second ad to its overwhelming success. Specifics in ads will nearly always beat generalities as a principle. This means one could predict the winner fairly accurately; but not so with this second set of ads.

These ads were exactly the same except for the URL. The URLs were GetMouldSolution and StopBlackMouldNow. The first ad out pulled the second by a significant 13%. And though we can speculate, it not easy to tell why one did better. This is why you need to test ads head to head.