AdWords Split Test Update, Beta Testing

Google AdWords has a new tool they’re trying out.  It’s called the AdWords Campaign Experiments (or ACE).  It’s taking some testing that normally takes a while and making it faster.ACE allows users to make changes to their campaigns and run a separate instance of the campaigns with changes while still keeping the old campaign settings in place.  It’s a simultaneous run, a split test.

It’s a great idea, I think – you can put in changes to your CPC to see how much more traffic you can get, you can restructure some ad groups to see if it helps as opposed to having all keywords in just one ad group, you can even just test out some new keywords to see what effect it will have.

The benefit of doing it as a split test means you don’t have to worry and wonder if the test you ran was effective because of the changes you made or because it was just during a peak seasonal flux in the market.  You’ll see them running simultaneously so you’ll know they had the same exposure and impact from external fluctuations in the industry.

Google’s made a video to explain it:

You can find out all the details on Google’s official announcement page for AdWords Campaign Experiments.