Ad Tester

  1. Run an AdWords Ad report with the following columns in order: Campaign, Ad Group, Headline, Description Line 1, Description Line 2, Display URL, Ad ID, Ad Status, Destination URL, Number of trials, Number of successes.
    In the default AdWords Ad Report the columns will appear in the correct order when they are enabled.
    To optimise the CTR the number of trials is the number of impressions and the number of successes is the number of clicks. To optimise the conversion rate, the number of trials is the number of clicks and the number of successes is the number of conversions.
  2. Export the report as a .tsv file or open it in Excel
  3. Copy and paste the whole report into the form below
  4. Adjust the strength of the test if you want to. The default value of 0.95 means that if there is a 95% chance of ad A being better than ad B then ad B will be paused.



To find out more about how this works (I hate black box solutions) read the Ad Tester Maths page.
I’ve also put up a page about the weaknesses of testing ads this way

Errors

I have implemented some more robust error handling but it is only useful from my point of view; entering bad data will no longer crash the whole wiki but you will not be informed if the data you enter is unreadable. Instead the Ad Tester will assume the unreadable value is 0.

By unreadable I mean the program is unable to interpret your input as a number if it is expecting. For example if you got the columns on your report mixed up so that instead of “Conversions” the Tester found “Ad Type” it would be unable to interpret this column to a number. Instead the Tester will assume all the values in that column are zero.