Adwords: To include “www.” or not in your Display URL?
August 9, 2007
Stumble it!When Google rolled out the “Optimize Campaign” feature I gave it a shot out of curiousity. One suggestion it made was that I should include “www.” in my Display URLs. I was not because my client has a long domain name.
Well, I decided to test it with some other accounts. I created duplicates of every ad. So I have two versions of each ad, one has the “www.” in the Display URL and the second one doesn’t. I also let Google decide how to display the ads. Here are my results after 3 weeks.
* Google served the ad with the “www.” more than the one without. Usually a 55% to 45% ratio.
* As for the CTR, it was inconclusive. The “www.” ads would sometimes have a better CTR even though they were served less. Other times, the “www.” ads would have a lower CTR.So does anyone have a better or more long term test of this? Whether you have done this test or not, do you include the “www.” in your Display URL or not?
- I’ve tested this a few times, and not found any significant impact on the clickthrough rates in general.
So I tend to leave it off if the URL is quite long, so that I can put the keyword or something similar at the end…
- If creating a display URL that appears to be going to an interior page, i leave www on, if the URL is short enough. It seems more credible when it is an interior page, rather than a cute marketing tactic (consumer’s mind).
Display URLs in which separate words are capitalized, display the www, and have a slash going to an interior page, for some reason…annoy me. Display URLs without www with CapitalizedSeparateWords/CapitalizedInteriorPage annoy me even more. Examples below.
www.AnnoyingURL.com/Annoying
MoreAnnoyingURL.com/Annoying
www.notsobadurl.com/ok
notsureifrelevanturl.com/maybe
Of course, I’m not my clients’ customers and everything should be based on split testing like you attempted. When those deem negligible in CTR, put yourself in the customer’s shoes and go with your gut.
Google will let you display a sub domain, even if your ad is not going to a sub domain, but an interior page. The same rules apply, it can not be misleading. This has worked very well for one client. It seems it would work best for companies that do not have industry KW rich names or it is not obvious by their name what they do. Example:
KW-KW2.CompanyName.com
Question made by: Huligan Answered by: CustardMite and seostew At Digital Forum
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August 14th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
I tend to think that adding the ‘www.’ takes away from the memorability of the domain name. I think of domains as a brand and preceding the brand with ‘www’ is only going to hurt you. Just my 2 cents…
March 7th, 2011 at 4:24 pm
I have done extensive testing on this topic, and have come to the conclusion, quantitatively there is little to no statistical significance to the www variable. the www identifies the website the ad directs the user to, which may have some psychological factors attached to them. Overall, I would agree with the statements above, focus on your brand, and include KW in your url.