MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

Some­times when I run out of ideas of new AdWords copy to try or when I am really busy or just feel lazy, I go back to the lit­tle stuff. The big sur­prise, how­ever, is that these tiny tests can some­times lead to the biggest improve­ments in my Google AdWords account.
Let me share a sim­ple and easy test that I ran last week. The only change that I made was to “cap­i­tal­ize” parts of my URL and to test whether cap­i­tal­iz­ing “A Min” would be a good or a bad idea?

The results?

Take a very close look at the above ads. You will prob­a­bly miss what is dif­fer­ent on your first try. Look again. The first thing that you will notice is that the ad copy is iden­ti­cal. We only tested two dif­fer­ent changes:

1) Split test­ing of the URL: “www.SilvaUltraMindSystem.com” vs. “www.silvaultramindsystem.com“
2) Split test­ing of “A Min” vs. “a min”

The shocker is that both of these made a big dif­fer­ence but not in a con­sis­tent or pre­dictable way. The best ver­sion turned our to be a hybrid (cap­i­tal­iz­ing the URL and not cap­i­tal­iz­ing “a min.”). In the end, this hybrid had the sec­ond best CTR (almost iden­ti­cal to the #1 ver­sion) but a 50% higher con­ver­sion rate than the #1 version.

What is the les­son here? Try lots of things and never ever stop test­ing. You will be sur­prised at how lit­tle steps can make a huge dif­fer­ence in your results.

Last 5 posts by

• Do you think SEO in other lan­guages is eas­ier? — Sep­tem­ber 18th, 2008
• Google Slap — How to recover from a Google Slap? — Sep­tem­ber 8th, 2008
• What Does Your Order But­ton Say? — August 29th, 2008
• Will Knol Rule The Search Engines? First Analy­sis Indicates…It Just Might — July 23rd, 2008
• Are small busi­nesses drop­ping out of AdWords? — July 23rd, 2008

About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

If you want to see what's in the private lab...

Ask yourself... which part of your business would you most like to improve?

I can send you 7 tactics related to your specific needs, if you like.

You don't have to buy anything, just take it as a backstage pass into our private course.

Will it give you the solution you've been waiting for?

There's only one way to find out.