AdWords: The Strangest Test

[abbottsys]

Originally Posted by attak

...Someone who actually needs invitro shouldn't have to deal with a SPAM result.-Attak

I hear your concerns, but don't agree. There is no spam involved. The landing page is very relevant, as is shown by the fact that the conversion rate is about 3X that of my regular ad!

If I was just getting great CTRs without conversions then I would agree with you. But the fact that I'm getting superb conversions shows that users are finding the ad/landing page highly relevant.

[abbottsys]

Originally Posted by miillss

Maybe your click through rate shot up because everyone was reading this forum and trying it out?!...

I'm running the ad on 2,000 keywords, and only published one here

[abbottsys]

SUMMARY:

Use Google.com as the display URL in your ad, and use a landing page with this type of construct:

google.com/search?q=keyword&sitesearch=yourwebsite.com

sitesearch= <your website>
q= <a keyword used to sitesearch your website>

So, your ad landing page is a Google sitesearch of your website.

Technical Notes:
1) Google serves Ads on sitesearch SERPs, and you clearly want to eliminate those. So it's important you choose a q= parameter to display the pages you want on the SERP but without ads. Adjusting this takes some trial and error. You might wind up using a q value that has absolutely nothing to do with your ad keywords.
2) This ad does not violate any Google AdWords ad policies. (At least, not that I know of.)

[abbottsys]

Test over.
After about a week of running the ad it was finally disabled by Google for trademark reasons. I'm surprised they did not catch this at ad creation time as they do for trademarks used in ad text. So, use of a Google landing page (and thus use of Google in the display URL) is a trademark violation. Makes sense.

[jimbeetle]

Kind of surprising that it took them a week to catch it, especially since you aren't shy about your tests.

Did you run just search or also run content?

Think beyond the domain name there might be a couple of other takeaways in there someplace. Fun test.

[abbottsys]

Originally Posted by jimbeetle

..Did you run just search or also run content? Think beyond the domain name there might be a couple of other takeaways in there someplace. Fun test.

Ran on both search and content. It was fun while it lasted.
Yes, there may be other takeaways from this test, let me ponder

[abbottsys]

Wow!!! I just discovered a variation on this ad test technique that seems to satisfy all Google trademark concerns. It's now in production. I'll report results soon.