Note: This article covers ad tests for the now-deprecated Expanded Text Ads. For help with search ads, try Opteo's RSA Writer.

Testing ads is one of the activities most undervalued by AdWords advertisers. More about that here.

You'll want to pause ads that significantly underperform compared to other ads in the same ad group. This way, the spend that would have gone to the lesser-performing ad goes into other, better-performing ads instead. Easy!

If you see Pause Losing Ad in your task list, it means Opteo has found a statistically significant difference in performance between two ads in the same ad group.

We use CPI (conversions-per-impression) as the primary performance indicator. More info about using CPI for ad testing here.
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When there aren't enough conversions to calculate CPI, we look at CTR (click-through rate) instead. Having a higher CTR results in a higher Quality Score, which has a magic impact on accounts (lower CPCs and higher volume leading to increased conversions and decreased CPA).

It can be tricky to make a fair, apples-to-apples comparison between two ads. For example, let's say that we're looking at the last 30 days of data comparing ad X and ad Y. What if ad X was running for weeks 1 - 2 and ad Y was running for weeks 3 - 4? 

What if you made a bunch of keyword changes in week 3 affecting ad Y's performance, or what if there was a big seasonality event (e.g. Christmas holidays)? Opteo solves this problem by only looking at data where both ads were running at the same time. 

To help you decide whether you'd like to push or dismiss the task, we'll show you the difference in several metrics including CPI (or CTR), top and abs. top impression share, and profit per impression. We'll also show you the statistical significance of these differences. 

Completing this improvement will redirect traffic towards higher performing ad(s) and improve your ad groups' performance.

You can choose to ignore CTR-based Pause Losing Ad tasks via your Client Settings. This way, you'll only get a Pause Losing Ad task when we find a statistically significant CPI difference between ads.

You can read more about forcing CPI decisions here.