Google have this week announced the BETA release of their new tool, ACE.  The ‘Adwords Campaign Experiments’ tool allows advertisers to compare the effectiveness of campaign changes in real-time.

This is great news for PPC (Pay Per Click) advertisers.  Currently the drill is to make a change, test it for a set period of time and then look at the post test analysis.  This has inherent problems, firstly a PPC auction is dynamic, do on any given day at and given time the auction looks different.  Advertisers run out of budget, use automated bidding tools and optimise to position amongst other things.  So, the auction landscape is never static making any test less than ideal – if nothing ever changed in the search landscape then there wouldn’t be such a problem.

So what does Googles new ACE tool do?  Simple, it allows you to do an A/B test, this allows you to test two different criteria simultaneously to see which one benefits your campaign the most.  So an example might be that you’re bidding on ‘iphone 4′, your registrations are consistent and CPA is on target but you want to see what happens if you reduce your CPC by 50%.  ACE can help you here, you can test the two criteria side by side and then measure the effectiveness of each, i.e. did volume remain consistent but your CPA fell by half or did it simply not meet either of your KPI targets.  Ultimately this new tool will help eliminate some of the guess work of making changes and enable us to accurately report the differences.

ACE will rotate the two variables evenly over time to ensure they both get equal exposure.  For more information you can visit Googles Ad Innovations site.  Currently this is limited to a US beta only, as it always is, however it’s certainly going to provide a good test bed when it does arrive in the UK.

There is one potential problem I can see agencies having however and that is tracking.  If you’re testing X vs Y to see what happens to CPA when your CPC’s are decreased then you will likely only be able to see conversions if you are using Google conversion tracking.  Either that or you’ll need to create a work around in your tracking tool of choice, i.e. dummy test links etc – this will be one to work on when we see how it works in principle.

Watch Googles demo:

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