When you set up your Google AdWords campaigns, you should create multiple ads for each ad group, in order to try and find the ad copy that is most effective. You have two options for how to rotate your ads.

Google AdWords has a feature called ad optimization, which Google defines as follows:

Optimize (default): The system will favor ads that have a combination of a high click-through rate (CTR) and Quality Score. These ads will enter the ad auction more often.

The alternative to optimization is a standard rotation in which all ads for an ad group will be displayed roughly the same number of times.

Of the two, intuitively it seems that you would always want to use ad optimization. It just makes sense to let Google automatically display the ads with the highest click-through rate (“CTR”).

But here’s the problem. If you are trying to fine tune your campaign ad groups for maximum performance, YOU yourself should judge which ads are most effective, based on an analysis of historical data. Google’s ad optimization kicks in quick. Ads that have a higher initial CTR will garner massively more impressions. So ads that could actually turn out to be the best performing over the long-run might be squeezed out of the picture early on.

Do your own optimization. Run all ads an even number of times. Give each ad a fair number of impressions. How many impressions will be different from situation to situation. If your are competing in a hot market with high click rates, then you might be able to tell after only a couple hundred impressions. But in most cases, you will need to give it more than that. Maybe a thousand impressions, maybe even more than that if click rates in your industry are low across the board.

If you do not have time to actively manage your search engine marketing campaigns, then you might still be better off using the optimization feature. It is better to use early optimization than to let poor performing ads run too long, dragging down your ad group performance.

But if you have time…do it right and take care of it yourself.

Or better yet…let us do it for you! Contact Work Media at 888-299-4837 or email info@workmedia.net to find out how we can make your life a whole lot easier.