Microsoft Advertising adds cookie-based experiment option

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.

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.

About The Author

George Nguyen

George Nguyen is an editor for Search Engine Land, covering organic search, podcasting and e-commerce. His background is in journalism and content marketing. Prior to entering the industry, he worked as a radio personality, writer, podcast host and public school teacher.