Bidding & Budgets
Experiments (Campaign Experiments and Drafts)
Google Ads experiments split a campaign's traffic between the original and a modified version so a change in bidding, keywords, ads, or settings can be measured against a control before being applied.
In practice
Changing a live campaign and watching what happens is not a test; seasonality, competitors, and randomness all move the numbers. An experiment holds those constant by running the original and the treatment at the same time on a randomized share of traffic. You set the split, the duration, and the metric, and Google reports the difference with confidence intervals.
Good experiment candidates are changes with a real hypothesis and enough volume to conclude: a bidding strategy switch, a target change, broad match with brand lists against phrase match, a new landing page. Poor candidates are low-volume campaigns and changes so small the test cannot detect them.
Experiments have quirks. While an experiment is in design, its settings are write-only and reads return nothing. Negative keywords added to one arm should be mirrored to the other so both stay comparable; bids and audiences should not be touched during the test. When it concludes, apply the winner or end it, then note the result.
Why it matters
It is the only way to know a change caused a result rather than coincided with one.
RELATED TERMS
Smart Bidding
Smart Bidding is Google's set of automated, conversion-based bid strategies (Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions, Maximize Conversion Value) that set auction-time bids using machine learning signals.
Broad Match
Broad match is the default keyword match type that shows ads for searches related to the keyword's meaning, including synonyms, related topics, and queries that do not contain the keyword's words at all.
Landing Page Experience
Landing page experience is the Quality Score component that rates how relevant, useful, transparent, fast, and mobile-friendly the page a searcher lands on is for the keyword and ad that brought them.
Written by Ilya Bulychev, Founder, Live PPC Ads. Part of the PPC Glossary.
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