AdWords campaigns can now be tested with confidence through campaign drafts and experiments, which are being rolled out by Google. Although AdWords campaign experiments aren’t a new concept, the new campaign drafts and experiments will make it even easier to test and evaluate changes to campaigns, allowing advertisers to stage multiple changes without actually having to push these live. For example, if an advertiser wanted to increase mobile bids for ad groups with high mobile conversion rates, they could create draft campaigns with different mobile bid adjustments for the various ad groups without having an impact on their existing campaign. Once they’re happy with the draft changes, they can go ahead and apply these to the original campaign. It’s important to note that there’s a list of reports and other features that aren’t accessible through draft campaigns on the AdWords support page. The obvious question that follows is how do advertisers know if a draft campaign’s destined to have the desired effect? The answer’s to run the new-look experiment, making it possible to test changes in a controlled environment, based on how much budget and traffic’s to be allocated. Using this information, Google will randomly divert users to the experiment whenever they carry out a relevant search on Google.com or through a partner site. Experiments have a pre-determined time frame and it’s possible to monitor and measure results to see whether they’re driving the desired outcome. When comparing an experiment with an existing campaign, performance results for both can be monitored through the performance scorecard, which has icons that indicate whether the experiment’s metrics are more favourable than the original campaign and what the significance of this is. If the experiment looks more favourable, it can be activated using the same budget and traffic as the original campaign, which is then put on hold. With campaign drafts and experiments, advertisers can also evaluate group level performance for deeper insights, as individual ad groups can be responsible for significant changes in the overall performance of a campaign. Some advertisers have already seen the benefits of campaign drafts and experiments in their accounts and those who haven’t yet benefited from the new tools will do so in the very near future.
19th February 2016
