AdWords Campaign Testing gets easier

Good news for AdWords advertisers: Campaign drafts and experiments is now out of Beta and available to all.

The new functionality allows advertisers to set up and test campaign changes easily. They can see the impact of those changes (in comparison to the performance of the original campaign) before deciding whether or not to update or replace the existing campaign.

Campaign drafts and experiments is not to be confused with AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) which has been available now for some years and limits testing to elements within a campaign.

A Campaign draft is just that — it’s not live. It’s a copy of an existing campaign (with the revisions you’ve made) which can be viewed within AdWords and shared with a co-worker or clients who may want to review and approve the changes before campaign launch.

If the draft is approved, you can then update the original campaign with the changes. Or you can run an experiment to test performance of the new campaign compared to the original, with a specified portion of the original campaign’s budget and traffic.

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Experiment results are easily viewed in a performance scorecard. If results are good or promising, you can activate the draft campaign or update the original campaign to incorporate the changes you’ve made.

Why should you care?

We’re big fans of improving campaign results through iterative testing, and you should be too.

Campaign drafts and experiments will likely prove invaluable when taking over a pre-existing account, but the opportunity to split-test results when making campaign updates will become elemental to our process.


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About the Author Jeremy Templer

Jeremy is a Partner and Senior Consultant at SureFire. Jeremy has been working in search since 1996, when he joined the Australian search engine, LookSmart. After relocating to San Francisco, he was instrumental in the development of the company’s paid search ad platform. At analytics company Coremetrics (now owned by IBM) he established an in-house search agency managing campaigns for Coremetrics clients such as Macy’s, Bass Pro and Lands End. At Acxiom he managed members of the pioneering SEO firm Marketleap and worked with clients such as Capital One, American General Finance and Kaiser Health. Joining SureFire in 2009, he is the head of Paid Search Advertising and oversees the delivery of AdWords and other PPC campaigns. He also helps clients make sense of their website data.