In the early days of paid search, people churned out articles with no real substance and “stuffed” them with their keyword phrases. (If you are still writing your landing pages that way, please stop now.) Ads were riddled with cheesy sales pitches and exclamation points. A few relics from the early days still remain. But as the competition increases, the survivors have had to change their ways.

Take a few minutes to peruse some blogs dedicated to cracking the PPC code; you’ll quickly realize everyone has their own recipe for success. It seems particular strategies work in certain combinations in different search engines.

And then a month later, they don’t. Oh, I don’t know if the landscape changes that fast. But it is constantly changing as search engines attempt to improve their business models to better serve the users, which, let’s face it, is actually good when you’re on the other end of things. It’s hard to keep up and to figure out which combination produces the most lucrative results.

One way to stay ahead of the learning curve is to keep reading about the multitude of strategies, choose the best ideas out there and test them. Conducting an A/B test in Google is a relatively simple way to discover what really works.

Just create a new campaign in Google and in user preferences, select “show ads more equally.” Now you can create two ads and direct them toward different landing pages to test how well your content converts. Or you can have two similar ads with different titles and see which gets you a better click through rate.

In the ever-changing world of online marketing, testing should become your secret weapon. Keep in mind; it’s impossible to hold all variables constant. So do your best to create a valid test with only one variable. And look at trends rather than for specific changes.

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