I took a good look at the trials I was running from the aspect of "either my ads stink, or my landing pages do." lol The numbers just kept going down. So, I looked good and hard and decided I had great ads but the landing page left a lot to be desired - unfortunately there was nothing I could do about that. It wasn't my site, so I decided to stop those trials and try something else ... just to make sure I wasn't doing something terribly wrong.
I decided to choose a site where people could shop over the holidays, and I would get credit for all of their shopping. Found a great site with a 90 day cookie. Area A of their site is a group of products people love to buy in the winter. I chose one particular item to promote with roughly 30 keyword phrases, and about ten negative words. I wrote two ads, set the cpc pretty high, and didn't look at it all day. (Which was harder than I thought it would be lol)
So here are my new numbers:
2 clicks
23 impressions
overall 8.6% CTR
Average Position 15.3
ad 1: 2 clicks/ 15.3% CTR
ad 2: 0 clicks/0 CTR
I switched ad 2's text to that of ad 1, but I'm pointing it straight to the product instead of Area A. Try to tighten the focus and give visitors less of a chance to wander off without making their decision right away.