Microsoft Advertising adds cookie-based experiment option

Cookie-based A/B tests will ensure that customers are only shown ads from either your experiment or original campaign.

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Cookie-based experiments are now available on Microsoft Advertising, the company announced Monday. If this option is selected, customers will only be shown ads from either your experiment or your original campaign when they search.

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The “Create an experiment” page with the new cookie-based split option.

Why we care

Microsoft Advertising experiments enable you to create a duplicate of a campaign and test (on a segment of its traffic) whether an update works better for your business. 

The new cookie-based experimenting option ensures that once a customer is shown one version of your ad, they will continue to be presented with the same version. This facilitates more accurate testing of creative and ad copy as a customer is only responding to either the original campaign or the experiment.

More on the announcement

  • While this may yield more accurate data for some experiments, it may also take longer to accumulate statistically significant comparison data as opposed to if you did a search-based experiment.
  • Microsoft recommends setting your experiment split at 50% to obtain enough volume more quickly and make comparisons more easily.
  • Microsoft first rolled out its experiments A/B testing tool in July 2019.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

George Nguyen
Contributor
George Nguyen is the Director of SEO Editorial at Wix, where he manages the Wix SEO Learning Hub. His career is focused on disseminating best practices and reducing misinformation in search. George formerly served as an editor for Search Engine Land, covering organic and paid search.

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