Optimise Your AdWords Account
Ever wanted to know what would happen to your campaign performance if you made changes to your keywords, bids, ad groups or placements? What sort of affect would this have on your costs and traffic? Previously the only way to do this was to run a campaign for a couple of weeks and perform a before and after analysis.
Now, using AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) you can perform a number of experimental tests that run alongside your original campaign. Using this tool will allow you to:
- Better optimise your account
- Lower the risk of testing new advertising strategies
- Revert back to your original campaign at any time
- See how performance metrics differ between original setup and experimental setup
How Do Campaign Experiments Work?
There are many different opportunities to explore using ACE. You can test and measure the impact of adding new keywords and match types to your campaign or restructure your campaign to use more tightly themed ad groups. You can also test to see what affect an increase on a keyword bid would have on your campaign.
For example, if your current bid for a keyword is 50p and you are curious to see what would happen to your conversions if that bid was increased to £1. You can run simultaneous bids where the 50p bid is shown in 50% of the auctions and the £1 is shown in the other 50% of the auctions. After a number of weeks, you may notice that your conversions have increased without a significant increase in cost per conversion, based on this feedback you decide that you want to use the £1 bid for your keyword all of the time.
You can experiment with any combination of bid, keyword, ad, ad group or placement changes to better optimise your account performance.
Getting Started
1. Login to AdWords and select the campaign you wish to test
2. Click Settings
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page and under ‘Advanced Settings’, select Experiment
4. Specify Experiment Settings
5. Provide a suitable Name, and select an experiment split, 50-50 is the fastest way to collect data but if you are being risky with your experiment you may want to change this ratio. Once the experiment has started this cannot be changed.
6. Select how long you would like to run the experiment. We suggest four weeks as being enough time for most campaigns, though it will depend on your traffic levels.
7. Click Save
Choosing Your Experiment
You can set up to 1000 changes to your keywords and ads using AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE). You can also decide if an entire ad group is part of an experiment and set an experiment bid for it. So, there are lots of options for you to play with. So many so that it can get confusing.
We advise on starting off slowly until you get used to experiments. It’s important to keep an eye on the experiment’s progress too. Don’t just forget about them. One other tip we’d give is to make sure that the ad group level experiment settings don’t clash with those at the ad or keyword level. The settings for your keyword or ad should be the same as the settings for the ad group they’re in to make sure that your ads show.
Hope you find this helpful. If you’re interested in using ACE to test different settings, bids or ad copy in your account, feel free to contact us.
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