Google is reportedly rolling out a new way to conduct broad match keywords experiments and A/B testing. Google wrote this "new approach is aimed at delivering faster results and reducing some of the common experimentation errors, by diverting traffic and budget within the existing campaign (instead of creating a campaign copy for the experiment treatment arm)."
This was first spotted by Hana Kobzová who said, "Instead of duplicating your campaign, the new setup lets you run experiments within a single search campaign using built-in control and treatment arms. This is available only for campaigns using Smart Bidding, and portfolio bid strategies are not supported."
Previously when running a Broad Match experiment in Google Ads, it involved creating a copy of your existing campaign. Now, the experiment will divert traffic and budget of your existing campaign evenly between the control group and the trial group.
So you have your control, a percentage portion of your existing Search campaign with your original keywords. And you have your trial, the remaining percentage portion of your existing Search campaign with original keywords and Broad Match versions of those keywords.
Once the experiment is complete, advertisers can evaluate performance and choose if they want to “apply the experiment”, which adds Broad Match versions of their keywords to their campaigns.
Experiment results can be found under the “Experiments” tab, with an expanded view of the “Experiment summary” page when you select the experiment campaign.
Here is the full new help document on how this all works.
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