Optimizing Performance / Experiments Flashcards
The Opportunities tab
Think of the tab as a personal assistant who customizes opportunities for your account. It can help you discover
new keywords, improve your bids and budgets, and more.
What the Opportunities tab helps you do
- See performance estimates based on historical data
- Make improvements without spending a lot of time
- Keep your campaigns fresh
About Campaign Experiments
AdWords Campaign Experiments allow you to
to test changes to your account on a portion of the auctions that your ads participate in.
Campaign Experiments give you a taste of the results so you can figure out whether you want to pour on the heat! This way, you can test changes to your
your keywords, bids, ad groups, and placements.
How experiments work
When you create an experiment, you decide what sort of change you want to test –
new keywords, a higher bid, new ads, or different placements, for example. Then, you decide what percentage of your auctions should have this experimental change.
Keep in mind that AdWords experiments are random-auction, meaning every time a user conducts a search on Google.com or our Search partners, or a new user loads a webpage on our Content partners, we’ll randomly
we’ll randomly decide to make either your control or experimental split active for the auction (based on the percentage you set within experiment settings).
After the experiment has been running for a short while, you can view the results on any page you normally use to view your campaigns and ads. These pages will also let you know if your experimental changes are performing
performing significantly better or worse than the ads without changes.
Common goals and elements of experiments
While your experiment goal will depend on your business, some common goals for advertisers include:
Increasing conversions
Increasing clicks or impressions
Improving return on investment
Improving campaign quality
Improving ad textCommon goals and elements of experiments
Using Google Search Network
New keywords
New ad text
New ad groups
Negative keywords at the ad group level
Most keyword match types
Ad group default bids, including max CPC
Max CPA if campaign is using Conversion Optimizer
Keyword insertion
Common goals and elements of experiments
Using Google Dispaly Network
Bids on managed placements
Additional placements
Additional keywords for contextually-targeted ad groups
New text ads or display ads
New ad groups
Ad group default bids, including max CPC and max CPM
Max CPA if campaign is using Conversion Optimizer
Remarketing options
Site exclusions
Common goals and elements of experiments
Any campaign settings you choose for your campaign while running an experiment will apply to the entire campaign, not just your experiment or control group. This means you essentially can’t test:
Targeting of any kind, including geographic targeting, language targeting, network targeting, and device targeting
Bidding features
Daily budget
Ad extensions
Ad scheduling
Frequency capping
Negative keywords at the campaign level
Costs of experiments
While campaign experiments don’t cost anything to enable, experiments are treated as changes to your account and will be
billed like any other campaign. If you raise your bid, for example, you’ll need to pay the costs associated with using that increased bid for whatever portion of traffic it affects.
Campaign experiments and Quality Score
Campaign experiments influence your Quality Score for any
for any keywords involved in your experiments.
Running an experiment might negatively impact your Quality Score in the
the short-term because you might test ads or bids that perform worse than your current ads or bids. However, in the long term, running an experiment and finding high quality ads or a better bid should raise your quality score, making up for this short-term drop in performance.
Campaign experiments and bid management tools
Not all bid management tools can be used to work with
with campaign experiments.
Choosing your experimental changes
You can make up to
up to 1,000 experimental changes to your campaign’s keywords and bids. You can also define entire ad groups to be a part of an experiment and set an experiment bid for the ad group.
Selecting existing keywords, ads, or ad groups for your experiments
Click Keywords, Ads, or Ad Groups depending on what you want to include.
In the status column next to the keyword, ad, or ad group you want to include, select whether you’d like the keyword, ad, or ad group to be in
both the control and experiment, Control only the control only, or Experiment only the experiment only.
How to view experiment results
From the Segment menu, click Experiment to show the control and experiment details for each campaign. Data for your experimental changes will appear in the “Experiment” row and data for your control group will appear in the “Control” row.
How to See how individual keywords, ads, or ad groups performed in your experiment
From the Segment menu, click Experiment to show the control and experiment details for each keyword, ad, or ad group. Data for your experimental changes will appear in the “Experiment” row and data for your control group will appear in the “Control” row.
If you can’t see your experiment data make sure to?
Make sure:
Your date range includes time when your experiment was running. The ads in your experiment have been approved to show. That any experimental bids are above first page bids.
Understanding the experiment report
If your experimental data is statistically significant, meaning that it’s likely that any differences in performance aren’t due to chance, we’ll display an
an Arrow up up arrow or Arrow down down arrow next to that data depending on whether your performance has increased or decreased.
Understanding the experiment report
As many as three arrows can appear in the same direction, and the more arrows in the same direction, the more statistically significant the results are. One arrow means that we’re
95 percent certain that the change is not due to chance, two arrows means we’re 99 percent certain, and three arrows means we’re 99.9 percent certain.
Understanding the experiment report
Two gray arrows Arrows in opposite directions mean the results are not
are not statistically significant.
Understanding the experiment report
Some things just take more time to develop. That’s why making conclusions based on results that are not statistically significant can be
can be misleading or just plain incorrect. Because larger date ranges include more data, you’re more likely to see subtle variations the longer you wait.
What things should you do to get better experiment reports
Evaluate your campaign as a whole
Statistical significance doesn’t necessarily mean it’s important
Choose a longer time frame
Wait for experiment results to become significant
Understanding difference in impressions between control and experiment groups
Even if you create an experiment that uses 50 percent of your auctions for experimental changes and 50 percent for your control, these groups might
might get different amounts of impressions. This can happen because the performance of keywords, ads, ad groups, and bids might be causing fewer or more impressions.
Understanding difference in impressions between control and experiment groups
For example, if you create an experiment with an experimental bid that’s 50 percent higher than your bid in your control group, that higher bid might result in your ad receiving
receiving many more impressions because it’s winning more auctions.
What you can do after your experiment ends
- Apply your experimental changes to your account
- Delete your experimental changes
- Run a follow-up experiment
- Extend your experiment
Running a follow-up experiment
What type of follow-up experiment you run should depend on your advertising goals and the results of previous experiments. Here are some common experiments you might want to run:
- Narrow your experiment to target a specific change
- Confirm that your experimental changes are good ones
- Expand your experimental horizons
Extending your experiment
At any time, you can extend your experiment to
to 90 days from the date you selected. To extend an experiment:
