New In AdWords: Stage Campaign Changes In Drafts, Test Changes In Experiments

Google has announced the rollout of Campaign drafts and experiments. Many advertisers have been seeing the functionality appear in their accounts over the past month or so, but all accounts will be getting the new tools over the next few weeks.

Google has offered AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) for years. However, these new tools are designed to make reviewing and testing changes more accessible than ACE.

Campaign drafts allow advertisers to stage multiple changes without actually pushing changes live and impacting results. A draft is essentially a copy of an existing campaign that can be edited like a regular campaign. It’s sort of like making changes to a campaign in AdWords Editor — nothing happens unless you post the changes. You can create a draft to show changes to a client or boss or co-worker to review and then push them live by applying the draft changes to the original campaign. Or you can create an experiment to test out how the draft campaign might compare against the original campaign.

Note that some of features and reports aren’t available for draft campaigns, including some bidding strategies. The complete list is available on the help page.

If you want to see how a draft campaign will perform, you can launch it as an experiment. Set how long you want the experiment to run and how much of the original campaign’s traffic and budget you want to designate to the test. Google then randomly activates the experiment or control campaign for the ad auction when a user performs a relevant search on Google.com or a search partner site based on the traffic split you set for the experiment.

Advertisers can monitor performance results for both campaigns in the performance scorecard. If an experiment proves successful (or promising), an advertiser can convert it into a new active campaign and pause the original campaign. The experiment will then have the same dates and budget as the original.

You can set up several drafts of a campaign but only run one of them as an experiment at a time. Drafts and experiments can only be applied to Search Network and Search Network with Display Select campaigns.