Ad serving...Optimise or Rotate?

[Matt Seigneur]

Which is the better option?

Optimise: Display better-performing ads more often
Rotate: Show ads more evenly

Cheers,
Matt

[ian-d]

Never found it to work very well, i just stick with a single ad for that selection of keywords. I've never got any good data from it.

[Michael_Anthony]

Optimise - we have bucketloads of data to support this recommendation.

[Matt Seigneur]

Cheers Ian - only one ad? Surely you'd want 2 ads so you can gradually improve your CTR by looking at which ad gets more clicks/conversions/etc, and improving on it?

Mike - cheers for that

[Michael_Anthony]

You're bang on the money Matt - this is one of the very few tools that Google have added to Adwords which does something other than make us spend more money.

[tbp]

I would also say optimise, you want your best performing ad shown more often.

The only thing to bear in mind though, is that your best performing ad may not tally up with Googles definition.

To me, my best performing ad is the one that offers the highest conversion rate, to Google its the one with the best CTR (hence making Google the best cash).

So, just keep an eye on your own stats, as well as Googles.

It helps though to show the best performing ad more often, you can then cull badly performing ad's and add in new ones. Over time, the best performing ad's will get better and better and offer the best results.

[dawso77]

It depends on how much time you have, if you are serious and want to make improvements to your campaign performance then its best not to optimise. Google will always favour higher CTR and those ads are not always the ones that convert well post click. You also lose control of your creative as you are letting Google decide, imagine what would happen if you had two ads that were evenly rotated and you were always improving the CTR/Conv rate of the lowest performing ad, over time (and it takes time) you would have a well defined campaign. But be warned without the correct attention you will find that your ads can go wild and start appearing all over which plays hell with your average position (and your sanity).

If you don’t have the above stick to optimise, about 95% of GGL advertises do this so you're no worse off.