• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, February 19, 2016

Google has announced another way to review and test changes in AdWords campaigns. The features -- Campaign Drafts and Experiments, announced Thursday -- allow marketers to draft the change and test them to determine the results before the campaign goes live. Both extend capabilities in AdWords Campaign Experiments.

Campaign Drafts allow advertisers to schedule multiple changes without instantly pushing them live and impacting results.

The Draft feature works as a copy of an existing campaign that marketers can edit and view. It is intended to give marketers insight into how changes will influence a campaign before publishing it online and works similar to the way changes are made in AdWords Editor, but the changes do not occur until the post goes live.

The feature, which Google calls Experiment, aims to help marketers understand when a mobile bid adjustment will help the advertiser reach specific campaign goals, explains Pallavi Naresh, product manager, AdWords at Google. He points to campaigns run by Red Ventures, and The Honest Co as examples of how the tools work.

The Honest Company runs multiple conversion types with varying levels of customer lifetime value. The new features allow Josh Franklin, search account manager, to test bidding strategies with a quarter of its campaign traffic and measure the impact on different types of conversion values. In the past it would have required massive changes to the campaign, he explains.

Marketers create an experiment from the draft to test those changes against the current bidding strategy, after deciding how much traffic and budget to split between the experiment and original campaign and the length of time the experiment will run.

Measurement also provides insight, how the changes will affect success of the campaign. Measuring the lift in conversions, for instance, provides insight into whether the new mobile bid adjustments result in a higher return on investment by comparing performance with the reporting scorecard or evaluating the ad group level performance.