• by Joe Mandese , 3 hours ago

It's been a little over a year since Google unveiled the beta version of AI Max -- its new AI-powered tool for setting up search advertising campaigns -- and this morning it unveiled new testing and planning tools for creating search campaigns.

Not to be confused with its long-standing Performance Max platform, which optimizes unified, cross-channel campaigns across Google (Search, YouTube, Display, Gmail, Maps, Discover, etc.) AI Max is a dedicated search-only campaign optimization platform.

You can see a simple demo of the ease-of-use of AI Max in a demo above, which was posted by Google, and it shows how -- in ten simple clicks -- an advertiser or agency can set up A/B test campaigns based on a brand's -- and its target's -- parameters.

As for the headline on this column, well, the demo shows ten clicks to get to the outcome vs. a one-click AI Max experiment it unveiled last September. In any case, the demo shows how easy and intuitively AI Max, which is a good thing since it will become the default was for setting up search campaigns starting next month.

"Building on the one-click experiments in AI Max, we’re now introducing a way for you to test different budgets and ROI targets across multiple Search campaigns in a single A/B test. Rolling out in September, this will help you see exactly how scaling up your campaigns impacts your bottom line," Google Director of Product Management, Search Ads Brandon Ervin explains in a post on the Google Ads & Commerce blog this morning.

"If you rely on specific brand or location controls, A/B testing just got simpler. New capabilities in AI Max experiments now let you run tests with these settings enabled, so you can confidently test the impact of AI Max without compromising those guardrails."