Ask any real PPC professional, and they will tell you that the #1 key to being successful with pay per click marketing is split-testing.

Everything having to do with your campaign needs to be split tested constantly. This means split-testing text ads, landing pages, as well as optimizing bid prices.

Changing just one word in an ad can increase click through rates by more than 400%. Not only that but changing punctuation can have an even greater effect. Landing pages can be optimized too! Shifting parts of your site, changing colors, and changing images will all change the conversion rate of your website. You need to find what changes the conversion and click-through rates for the better.

Testing is not a one-time deal, it needs to be thought of as a business process and monitored on a continuing basis.

The chi-squared formula is an easy way to split test your ads. This formula tells you how many clicks are needed before we have enough information to make the test relevant. Once we know the test was relevant, we can remove the loser and start another test.

Using the Chi-Square formula, we can make sure that our tests are a minimum of 95% accurate. There are software programs to do this, but it is beyond the scope of this article.

If I were to play Tiger Woods in a game of golf, there is a possibility, albeight slight, that I could beat him once. However, if Tiger Woods and I were to play a game of golf everyday for 60 days, there is a virtually no chance that I could beat him more than 50% of the time over that timeframe. Playing just 1 game of golf is completely insignificant in the overall scheme of things.

This is the same concept we talk about in this article. You need to make sure that you have enough data to make educated decisions.

If you are serious about getting a good return on your investment when it comes to paid search marketing, make sure that your team is split-testing your text ads and landing pages constantly. Failure to do so will almost definitely spell disaster for your PPC campaign.