Keep Your Ads Fresh – Or AdWords Will Default

Keep your Ads fresh: Adwords to default to “Optimise for clicks” after 30 days.

Currently Adwords advertisers have the luxury of being able to utilise three different ad rotation settings: optimise for clicks, optimise for conversions and rotate evenly.

The rotate setting allows advertisers to test their ads and make sure each one is shown for an equal amount of time as others. However Google have argued that leaving this setting on indefinitely can inhibit performance and deliver less relevant ads to users.

Therefore starting next week the “rotate” setting will still run, but will not run indefinitely, instead ads will now only rotate for a maximum of 30 days before reverting to the “optimise for clicks” setting.

The Inside Adwords blog states:

“This change will enable us to provide users with the most relevant ad experience and should help advertisers improve the performance of their AdWords accounts.”

This latest change is an effort from Google to continue to provide relevant ads for their users, but it needs to be viewed with caution. Google is interested in ads that receive the most clicks (as these make the most money), whereas advertisers should be interested in ads that receive the most conversions (as these make them the most money).

If you are an advertiser who doesn’t regularly test ad copy you may notice a change in performance, particularly if the ad that delivers most clicks doesn’t deliver the most conversions then you are likely to see increased costs. However if you are an advertiser who regularly tests their ads you will notice no difference, because if you make a change to an advert the 30 day period will be reset.

The main thing to note is that while currently an advert test can run indefinitely, this latest change forces advertisers to keep their tests to a regular interval otherwise they will lose the benefit of advert rotation after 30 days.