Google's Responsive Search Ads mix your headlines automatically, making traditional A/B testing impossible. Instead, group ads by theme and compare cost per conversion. Their example: luxury homes outperformed corporate rentals, showing which angle resonates with your audience.
Do you no longer have perfect control over how your ads appear in Google search results? Instead of you being able to specify exactly what the headline is going to be and how it's going to appear and what body copy is going to be, and how that's going to appear, you have to enter multiple headlines and multiple body copies and Google is going to cycle through those different combinations to find a combination that gets the best performance or that is the most relevant or gets the highest click through rate. So how do you test that? How do you really test a certain headline or test a certain piece of copy to see if it's going to move the needle on results? Well, the answer is it's very difficult. But the best thing you can do when it comes to testing responsive search ads is testing different themes. So in this case here, for example, there are two themes being tested rather than two different headlines or body copies because we know we can't control the specifics when it comes to a responsive search ad. In this case, we've got corporate rentals as a theme versus luxury designer homes as a theme. Assuming that the terms within this ad group are all going to be potentially relevant to either of those, and we can't actually tell which this would actually tell us which of the themes is going to make the most sense for the traffic that these ads are showing for. And in this case here, you can actually see that the cost per conversion for corporate rentals is significantly higher than for designer luxury homes. So the traffic in this case is more interested in luxury homes. And that's what we can start to build our next test around.
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