You Can Test Your Text And Display Ads With AdWords Campaign Experiments

A few months ago, Google launched AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE), a free tool that makes it easier to test and accurately measure the impact of changes to your keywords, bids, ad groups, placements – and now ads themselves! ACE permits you to run experimental changes on a percentage of your AdWords traffic. You can compare statistics for experiment versus control traffic and receive statistically important results, which tell you with confidence whether your experimental changes improved your performance.

You can precede ad experiments on both text and display ads. Here are some of the components you can test with each:

Text Ads:

Ad text
Headlines
Display URLs
Calls to action

Display Ads:

Images
Display URLs
Calls to action

You can test text ads against other text ads and display ads against other display ads, but ACE permits you to do more. If your ads are chosen into the Google Display Network, you can also compare the performance of your text ads to that of your display ads on Display Network sites. If you don’t previously have display ads in your account, they’re easy to create with the display ad builder located within AdWords.

Pay Per Click

In the earlier times, you may have used ad rotation to test ad variations within an ad group. The main variation between ACE and ad rotation is that ACE allows you to decide the percentage of traffic on which you want your experiment to run – giving you more control over which ads show when. Within each split, ACE will value the “optimize” or “rotate” ad rotation settings you’ve set in your campaign settings tab.

Although this attribute is still in its infancy, for advertisers with an curious mind and a desire to constantly improve their KPI’s, ACE is simply a must have. Ongoing testing should be an important part of campaign management and will result in a much more profitable AdWords account, which of course makes for a profitable campaign soon.

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