Google Ads Campaign Experiments: A Controlled Environment to Test Almost Any PPC Campaign Strategy Theory

G
This is part 8 of 50 in 'The Science of PPC' blog series
The Science of PPC is a 50-part series by Andrew Goodman of Page Zero Media with new content published every Thursday. The goal of the series is to expose readers to enough insights, tips, tricks, and examinations of real-world methodologies to walk away with some feeling of mastery and confidence in their own powers of PPC analysis. Learn more

Note: this series is about ideas. It is not a step-by-step tutorial on how to navigate the ever-changing PPC advertising interfaces. Screen shots are employed selectively to elucidate the subject matter, but figuring out the precise order of implementation steps…that’s up to you.

What more important topic is there to discuss under the heading of “The Science of PPC” than the design and conception of experiments?

In this case, I don’t use the term “experiments” loosely, in the sense of just tinkering with this and that.

A better way [to experiment] would be to split campaign traffic in real time into two (unbiased) streams – a control group and an experiment group. That’s exactly what Google Ads Campaign Drafts and Experiments can do.
Sometimes, you want to make a significant and possibly even fundamental change to a campaign, but how do you know if the change “worked”? “Before and after” studies are unreliable for a number of reasons, including seasonality and the entry and exit of competitors in your keyword auctions.

A better way would be to split campaign traffic in real time into two (unbiased) streams – a control group and an experiment group. That’s exactly what Google Ads Campaign Drafts and Experiments can do.

It’s a fascinating feature of Google Ads. Or perhaps “architectural framework” is a better term than “feature.”

I’m not much for the Drafts part, so let’s focus on the Experiments.

Getting Started with Google Ads Campaign Drafts and Experiments

Telling people that a fancy architectural framework (like a laboratory with unlimited beakers, powerful data interpretation capacity, sound methodological underpinnings such as isolating the impact of one major change (or set of changes) from contaminating influences, intervening variables, spurious correlation, however you want to put it) exists, and “go nuts,” is a little like setting up an Open Forum Panel at a digital marketing conference in Sweden starting at 8:00 a.m. after the late-night party. “Really! The experts are here. You can ask them anything. Anything at all. Anyone? How about you sir in the very back next to the door?”

Crickets.

Nothing happens.

Some people leave.

Experiments reside at the Campaign level. Govern your thinking and scope appropriately.
The experts (one of whom didn’t show up at all, possibly related to the aforementioned party), their party reduced to two, begin talking among themselves, interrogating each other. The attendees sigh with relief, sit back and listen. Some take notes. It isn’t a Q&A anymore, but a fruitful session is in the books as the sun rises higher in the northern sky.

After coffee and handfuls of candy, the day brightens further. People converse more and more.

Like the sleepy-eyed and buttoned-down Swedes at the awkward Q&A, it seems like unstructured “go aheads” need to be lubricated with a little prompting. And some people just like to take notes.

That’s why, next week, I’ll provide a few specific examples of fruitful experiments you may want to set up in well-established PPC campaigns.

For now, the Campaign Experiments methodology typically works as follows:

  1. Take a campaign that you have some serious questions about. How would it perform if we took a markedly different approach to “X”? X could mean a number of things: bidding, types of ads, adherence or disdain for grandiose theories about campaign structure or match types, etc. (hence my plan here, to provide you with several ideas for what X might actually be). Notice how instrumental this Experiments architecture could be in taking assertions, arguments, questions, subjective biases, “personal, quirky, heroic” methodologies that individuals proudly wear like tattoos in an attempt to get noticed (“best practices or admitting that there might be a few ways to get to the same result are for sheep!”), etc., into the realm of Proof with a capital P. Sweeping assertions give way to empirical research with a sound, verifiable methodology. In a climate of full transparency.
  2. Start by stating for all involved your hypothesis and the type of theory you intend to test. For example, “I believe that replacing every single traditional broad match keyword in this large campaign with broad match modifier will lead to higher conversion rates, better CTR’s, slightly lower volume, and overall better ROI. The end result will be more conversions for fewer dollars, with the added benefit of reducing the time burden associated with regularly adding negative keywords.”
  3. Begin using the Campaign Drafts & Experiments architecture by initiating a campaign draft, following the steps such as establishing the duration (depending on volume, 4-8 weeks is a good time frame – any longer can be a burden, any shorter may leave you wondering if you should have let statistical confidence grow stronger), specifying the % of split traffic that will go to the experiment vs. the control (50-50 is most intuitive), and so on.
  4. Make all the detailed changes to the campaign you have to make to activate a test of your theory from point 2 above, doing so of course in the Drafts section of the architecture for this campaign.
  5. Save the draft and initiate it as an Experiment (it’s a little tricky for newcomers and even experienced people, and sometimes you want to ask yourself “where am I?,” but you get used to it).
  6. You’re off to the races! You’ll need to wait a day or two to see the initial horse race results in the Experiments dashboard. Remember, Experiments reside at the Campaign level. Govern your thinking and scope appropriately. (Tiny changes to a couple of ad groups, and claims about whether or not to add a certain type of campaign at all, for example, wouldn’t make good candidates for a Campaign Experiment.)
  7. Huge caveat here! (Huge, which is why I ended the last sentence with an exclamation point instead of a colon!!!) Potential ad impressions for your business aren’t exclusive to campaigns. In other words, the keywords and other targeting methods that trigger ad impressions can overlap across campaigns, and queries can be associated with these keywords and targeting methods in different parts of your account depending on whichever one of the competing keywords or methods in your account garners the highest Ad Rank on a given user query. The same thing happens at a micro level if you have a variety of keywords and match types with potentially overlapping audiences coexisting in the same ad group. Bid one keyword up, another’s potential audience may decrease. The shorthand term for this is cannibalization. You’d better hope your experiment design doesn’t just lead to one or the other half of the experiment showing a marked increase in how many queries it pulls away from other existing parts of your account – especially if those parts are low-hanging fruit or parts that, for one reason or another, you’d prefer to bid less on. (Cannibalization and cherry-picking sound like a potential feast for a starving person, but they won’t help your financial performance.) Nope, the methodology here isn’t airtight. It can be very good at getting us further down the road of advanced testing, but you have to spot-check a few things to ensure it isn’t a form of cheating.
  8. Don’t touch anything on either side of the Experiment for the duration of the Experiment. Google is working on a feature so that changes to one part will be mirrored in both parts so it won’t matter if you wandered into the lab like a bull in a beaker shop, but hey, let’s keep it real.
  9. Modify columns in the Experiments dashboard if you’d like to see a different set of KPI’s in the reporting.
  10. Enjoy the fantastic dashboard feature that reports on the statistical confidence level that any particular KPI associated with the Experiment group diverged (or “beat,” or “lost to”) the same in your Control group. The reporting is user-friendly, even for a relative novice.
  11. Decide whether your theory was proven or disproven.
  12. Either accept the experimental version of your campaign as the new, reigning version of your campaign, or revert fully to the original, having conceded that the null hypothesis – the theory didn’t pan out as expected or hoped – must be respected.
  13. Resume normal optimization efforts in this campaign.

This experiment did not pan out. A match type strategy produced a marked dropoff in conversions, so we reverted to the original campaign. Hover over the blue asterisk and Google Ads provides even more detail about the statistical significance associated with any given performance metric in the Experiment group.

Five ideas for experiments: Coming next week

You should be able to isolate exactly what significant change should be credited with improved performance in real time, as opposed to “before-and-after” studies that may carry on as many moving parts are, well, moving.
So what would you like to learn about? Has someone come to you citing a smart-sounding blog post insisting on eliminating all broad match keywords from accounts? Do you wonder if a more aggressive keyword bid stance on more than half the keywords in the campaign (filtered by conversion volume, ROAS, and competitive metrics like a not-too-high Search Top IS) will be worth the added cost of the aggressive bidding? Has Google come to you touting the benefits of a Smart Bidding strategy? With Campaign Experiments in Google Ads, you can call the pundit’s (or Googler’s) bluff and get answers to your own burning questions first-hand.

By doing so using the Campaign Experiments framework, you can be open to productive change, rather than stubbornly sticking to the status quo or capriciously adopting trendy strategies second-hand. (Certain crazy theories in any industry have a tendency to go viral. And, as I suggested above, some individual campaign managers love to adopt novel strategies so they can get credit for originality. Performance, though, is all that should matter. And you should be able to isolate exactly what significant change should be credited with improved performance in real time, as opposed to “before-and-after” studies that may carry on as many moving parts are, well, moving.)

Here’s to science. Tailored, first-hand experimental science.

I’ll dig in with comments on some specific examples of Campaign Experiments next week.

Read Part 9: 5 Suggested PPC Campaign Experiments

About the author

Andrew Goodman

Andrew Goodman is Founder & President of Page Zero Media. His accomplishments include writing the first-ever full-length book about Google AdWords, heading up this Google Ads Premier Partner agency, maintaining a string of 48 consecutive speaking engagements at Search Engine Strategies in North America, co-founding a startup called HomeStars, and wearing the dickens out of a lab coat at the SMX Advanced session called Mad Scientists. His active lifestyle requires increasingly elaborate bowls of yogurt. He works from the Toronto office as well as a home office in Fredericton, NB.

Latest Entries

Tags

About the Author

Andrew Goodman is Founder & President of Page Zero Media. His accomplishments include writing the first-ever full-length book about Google AdWords, heading up this Google Ads Premier Partner agency, maintaining a string of 48 consecutive speaking engagements at Search Engine Strategies in North America, co-founding a startup called HomeStars, and wearing the dickens out of a lab coat at the SMX Advanced session called Mad Scientists. His active lifestyle requires increasingly elaborate bowls of yogurt. He works from the Toronto office as well as a home office in Fredericton, NB.

PPC Management Services

Looking to work with our search marketing agency, Page Zero Media? We’d love to hear from you. Just fill out our form to get a quote

🙂