A wiser man (or woman) than I coined the quintessential acronym of paid search. Rather than the ABCs of sales (Always Be Closing), savvy paid search managers live and die by ABT — Always Be Testing.
In a session presented recently at SMX East, three of the brightest in the industry shared their tiers of testing strategies, successes and failures. “Perfect Your SEM Testing: How & Why To Evaluate Everything” featured insights from Ted Ives, owner of Ted Ives Consulting; Jake Pinocchio, a digital marketing associate at Red Ventures; and Susan Waldes, president of Fivemill.
Perfect Your SEM Testing — Ted Ives
Ted Ives kicked the panel off with a focus on data collection. He asserted that the first thing an advertiser or agency should do is to step back and assess the data you need to measure. He stressed that his ultimate goal when he tests is to maximize profit for his clients.
Ives’ testing philosophy is contrarian to my Always Be Testing mantra expressed earlier. It’s important to remember that testing 100 percent means at least 50 percent of it will be underperforming. Instead, Ives recommends evaluating potential negative impact and testers’ workload before structuring a test.
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