Have you ever wanted to test a new bidding strategy, setting, or other element of your campaign with a fixed budget or duration?

Campaign drafts and experiments in Google Ads let advertisers do just that.

Why use experiments over traditional ad rotation or period comparisons?

If you’ve ever tested landing pages, setting changes, or advanced bid adjustments in a campaign, you may have done a period test or used Google’s ad rotation settings to give you a clean comparison.

While these strategies let you quickly test a change on the fly, they often lead to inaccurate data, poor performance, or lots of manual analysis.

Google said about campaign drafts and experiments:

“Drafts and experiments let you propose and test changes to your Search and Display Network campaigns. You can use drafts to prepare multiple changes to a campaign.

From there, you can either apply your draft’s changes back to the original campaign or use your draft to create an experiment.

Experiments help you measure your results to understand the impact of your changes before you apply them to a campaign.”

You can use Drafts and Experiments for any Search and Display Network campaign to test different settings like:

• Target CPA
• Bid strategies (automated bidding strategies)
• Device settings
• Location adjustments
• Ad extensions
• Negative keywords
• Structural campaign changes

Display & Remarketing targeting:

• Remarketing audiences
• Display interests
• Display placements
• Display topics

Tests that will impact your quality score and you will want to allow additional time to build up history and quality score:

• Ad copy
• Ad landing pages
• Ad copy display paths
• Keyword changes or additions

How to Use Drafts in AdWords Experiments

Drafts are often created to show clients or bosses how potential changes will impact a campaign.

For example, if you’re tasked with updating the strategy of an existing campaign, you can use drafts to show how changing different features will impact the overall result.

From there, drafts can then be applied to an experiment or the actual campaign.

How to Use AdWords Experiments

The experiment functions just like a campaign.

First, you set how long you would like the experiment to run and choose how much of the original campaign’s budget and traffic you’d like to use on it.

Then, when a prospect lands on a search page, Google will randomly whether your experiment or actual campaign appears, based on the split you selected.

Throughout the AdWords experiment advertisers can monitor results on their performance scorecard.

Short conclusion

Don’t end the experiment early because you think you already know the victor. Even if the experiment says it has a statistically significant result, you should always wait for the time on the experiment to finish before making a judgement.

The reason for this is long, complicated and very mathsy. But if you do so, you bias the results and increase the likelihood of a false positive in your experiment.