There are different ways to generate tests within Google Ads. Often, as with A/B testing ads, we simply edit a live campaign and see if the change had a positive or negative impact. However, Google Ads has a section called “Drafts & experiments” that is designed to create changes and then test those changes without actually changing the campaign. There are three tabs within the section: campaign drafts, campaign experiments, and ad variations.
How campaign drafts work
Drafts let you prepare multiple changes to a campaign without impacting its performance. When you create a draft, you’re mirroring your campaign’s setup. From there, you can make updates to your draft just as you would in a normal campaign. At any point, you can leave and return to your draft to make additional changes to it, or discard the draft altogether.
After you’ve finished drafting your changes, you can apply your draft to the original campaign or create an experiment to test how your changes perform against your original campaign.
How campaign experiments work
After you’ve finished a draft, instead of applying your changes to your original campaign, you can convert your draft to an experiment. Note that while you can have multiple drafts for a given campaign, only one of those drafts can run as an experiment at a time. As you set up your experiment, you can specify how long you’d like it to run and how much of your original campaign’s traffic (and budget) you’d like it to use.
When a potential customer performs a search on Google or a search partner website, or loads a webpage on the Display Network, either your original campaign or your experiment is randomly made active for the auction, depending on how you’ve split the traffic share between your campaign and your experiment.
As your experiment runs, you can monitor and compare its performance against your original campaign. If you’d like, you can change the dates of your experiment to end it early. If your experiment performs better than your original campaign, you may consider applying your experiment to the original campaign. You also have the option of converting your experiment into a new campaign with the same dates and budget as your original campaign and pausing your original campaign.
Ad variations
Ad variations allow you to easily create and test variations of your ads across multiple campaigns or your entire account. For example, you can test how well your ads perform if you were to change your call to action from “Buy now” to “Buy today.” Or you can test changing your headline to “Call Now for a Free Quote” across ads in multiple campaigns.