PPC Question
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After watching today's excellent WBF by Brian on Adwords, I still have a question. At one point do you believe a PPC keyword or adgroup has enough data to make a decision. Brian mentioned 30,000 impressions. I've heard 200 clicks.
Is there a concensus or set of rules anyone could recommend as a guideline. I do PPC but it's not a daily focus, and find myself vacillating, and frankly, probably wasting time and money by not having a more defined approach to PPC.
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You can't really avoid doing the math to figure out the probability that the better ad is actually besting the older ad. It's a function of both the impressions and clicks so it's not easy to eyeball. I threw together a little spreadsheet that should do the math for you if you put in the click and impression data. I checked it with some data and I think it's working. It'll calculate whether we're 90% sure, and 95% sure which is better. Just put in your ad numbers and you should be good to go! Usually, if the 90% variation matches up with my expectations, I go with it. Otherwise, you might wait for 95% just to be sure.
My worksheet: http://www.mediafire.com/?pmu2mc6n5f6vw5s
A/B testing people deal with confidence intervals all the time, so they know their stuff. Here's some reading about it if you're interested:
- http://support.optimizely.com/kb/advanced/what-does-chance-to-beat-baseline-actually-mean
- http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/what-you-really-need-to-know-about-mathematics-of-ab-split-testing/
Hope this helps!
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