Test your text and display ads with AdWords Campaign Experiments

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

What can I test?

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

Text Ads	Display Ads
Ad text Headlines Display URLs Calls to action	Images Display URLs Calls to action

You can test text ads against other text ads and display ads against other display ads, but ACE allows you to do more. If your ads are opted 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 already have display ads in your account, they’re easy to create with the display ad builder located within AdWords.

What about ad rotation?

In the past, you may have used ad rotation to test ad variations within an ad group. The main difference 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 respect the “optimize” or “rotate” ad rotation settings you’ve set in your campaign settings tab.

To learn how to set up ad experiments, watch the video below. You can also view our other how-to-videos and additional FAQs to learn more.

Happy experimenting!



Posted by Gordon Zhu, Inside AdWords crew