Does Googles New AdWords Campaign Experiments Make AdWords a More Viable Form of Monetization?

Google has recently launched a new feature that could possibly shake up the world of pay per click advertising.  Known as AdWords Campaign Experiments, the feature is designed to help advertisers optimize their campaigns in a very unique way, and is something that could essentially render third-party bid management services expendable.  More importantly, this tool has the potential to make AdWords a much more viable form of monetization. 

AdWords Campaign Experiments or simply ACE, is a tool that allows online marketers to run split tests for their advertising campaigns.  Until now, the only way to get a feel for how any change made to an ad would perform was to blindly make the change and then compare the results.  What many advertisers learned is that this system was inaccurate and highly ineffective due to a number of uncontrollable variables.  ACE gives advertisers a more accurate assessment of how changes will impact performance by providing the ability to run an experimental campaign beside the existing version.  According to Google, it can be used in conjunction with changes made to bids, keywords, placement, or ad groups. 

We will provide an example to show you how the Adwords Campaign Experiments feature can be used to optimize your advertising campaigns.  Let’s say you are selling golf clubs and decide to raise you bids to get more traffic to your ads.  A week later, the U.S. Open commences, and you notice that both your clicks and impressions have skyrocketed immensely.  Ordinally, you would not know whether the traffic boost was due to raising your bid, or increased interest from the golf tournament.  With ACE, you can run an experiment to test the changes to your bid and see how your previous bids performed during the event.  Perhaps the most important factor is that you can determine whether making changes to your bid is even necessary. 

The AdWords Campaign Experiment tool makes it possible to measure the affect of making various changes to your ads.  If you have been looking for new ways to optimize your online advertising strategy, but not sure how it will impact the performance of your campaign, the splitting testing capabilities of ACE could provide the answer.  Running an experiment gives you the ability to measure the changes based on your AdWords statistics, and even if you find those changes to be unsuccessful, you can easily turn them off and leave your campaign as is. 

AdWords Campaign Experiments itself is a an experimental feature currently in the beta testing stage.  Right now, only select advertisers in the United States have been invited to give it a test spin.  There is no word on when the feature will be made publicly available, but just knowing that it could be here in the very near future has some advertisers dripping with anticipation. If you fall in that category, you will definitely want to stay tuned on the developments.