AB testing in Adwords i’d guess is performed by a very small minority of Adwords users yet it’s a really valuable tool that can help maximise your Adwords results.
What things can you AB test in Adwords?
You can test a wide variety of things within Adwords experiments. Here are the tests that I think can lend most value to your campaigns:
1) Ad copy – the obvious one. Run 2 or more ads together and see which has the better CTR, conversion rate and ROI.
2) Destination url. Find out which destination url produces the best conversion rates and ROI.
3) Dynamic destination urls. I sometimes work with a developer to make elements on the page change, usually the h1 (header tag/title), by using paramaters in the destination url e.g. abc.com/example-page V abc.com/example-page?Sale-Ends-This-Week. The latter changes the standard H1 on the page to ‘Sale Ends This Week’. If you access to a savvy developer you could do the same for images, pricing and whatever else you think could be changed on the page. Example of a H1 that could be tested…
4) Bids. I’ve never heard of anyone else doing this before and perhaps it’s not well known that you can do this but you can actually AB test your max cpc’s. This can help you find out things such as; how much extra traffic you can get by being in top position, what the impact is on CPA by bidding +50%, how much more impression share you can get by increasing your bids etc etc.