How many clicks until you make a decision about an ad?

[gmac17]

I'm at a new job, and I started all their campaigns from scratch. I've created about 8 ads in each ad group and hope to evaluate / cut back / test and optimize from there.

The trouble I'm having is that it has been a few weeks and it will be a few more until I have even 100 clicks per ad in a lot of the ad groups. In a perfect world I'd wait until I had 200 or so clicks before I made a decision on the effectiveness of an ad...

how do you handle it?

[rocknbil]

Few weeks = 3? What's the ad positions? I'd start forming an opinion if they are positioning well at all.

Hard to say with only 8 ads, you should have more ads. :-)

[gmac17]

I only have 8 ads because I want to be able to look at things statistically and get rid of the bad ones. But if you only have 50 clicks each, and one has one sale and the next one doesn't have any, you can't make too much of an assumption until you have more clicks....

[mzb8]

Hi

It seems like a lot of ads for each adgroup. I suggest using 2 to 3 ads per adgroup. I suggest the following:
1. Ad using Dynamic Keyword Insertion. ie {KeyWord:buy my product}
2. 1 to 2 ads without DKI.

You want to make sure you have none DKi ads as well in case it does not display the DKI because of trademark restrictions, poor keyword quality score or if the keyword is longer than 25 characters.

Next,

use www.splittester.com to test the effectiveness of your ads. ie... If you've got two ads that have different click-through rates right now,
how sure can you be that those ads will perform differently in the long run?

Best
Mike