A few years ago, Microsoft Advertising Experiments debuted. With this tool, marketers can execute standard A/B tests to experiment with campaign iterations to determine what variations work the best.
According to Microsoft Advertising, an experiment “is a duplicate version of your campaign that provides you with a controlled environment to monitor a change without fully launching it across your whole campaign. This way, you can run a true A/B test within a campaign to determine whether a particular update will work well for you and your business.”
A few examples of Microsoft Advertising Experiments use cases might include:
- Ad copy tests. Check messaging to find the ones with the best click-through rate or conversion potential.
- Landing page URL tests. Experiment to see which landing pages result in better performance for your campaigns.
- Bidding strategies and modifiers tests. See if a smart bidding tactic or different bid adjustments can drive incremental value.
For the most accurate results, Microsoft recommends running your experiment in what they call “A/A mode” for two weeks. This simply means that your original campaign and experiment campaign remain the same for the first two weeks. This allows you to validate that the experiment campaign is running the same as the original so that you can run a true A/B test.
After the initial two-week ramp-up period, check to see if the performance of the duplicate matches the original campaign. If it does, then you can start the actual A/B experiment. Once you make the desired change to your duplicate campaign, Microsoft Advertising recommends that you run the experiment for at least two more weeks (and four or more when testing complex bidding strategies like Target CPA and Maximize Conversions) to compare performance.
Skai support enhances Microsoft Advertising Experiments
Microsoft Advertising’s Experiments tool is now even better with Skai! Our platform helps foster a true test-and-learn culture for your paid search program by making A/B and Pre/Post tests easy to set up, analyze, and scale.
Skai’s Experiments for Microsoft Advertising allows you to make decisions backed by better data for peak performance.
With Skai you can easily:
Run experiments on everything to truly zero in on the best-performing elements of your campaign
Test multiple campaigns simultaneously for more conclusive results in a shorter time to insights. One of the main advantages of multi-campaigns is that one campaign may not have enough volume to reach statistically significant results. Grouping campaigns running the same test helps to get conclusive results much faster.
Exclude anomalies for a more accurate analysis. As anyone who has run many marketing experiments knows, anomalies often pop up that can skew test results. For example, if a tracking code was mistakenly deleted, a landing page URL accidentally switched, or something happened in the world that spiked or dropped conversion activity for a few days.
In most of these cases, the marketing experiment has to be stopped and started over. With Skai Experiments, the practitioner needs only to identify those dates for the system, and that data will be excluded from the analysis.
Easily exclude data from the dates you choose
Slice and dice daily results using Skai’s visual dashboards, leaving clunky data manipulation behind and confidently making quick decisions.
Skai Experiments offers at-a-glance insights
Scale testing with the ability to create Microsoft drafts and experiments campaigns in bulk. This is especially useful when you want to run many experiments simultaneously. It reduces the total time it takes to set up your experiments and reduces errors that can slow down your entire test-and-learn program.
“Monitoring our tests through Skai’s Experiments solution enhanced our confidence in the results and delivering those back to our clients—allowing for more strategic discussions regarding further tests and improvements.” — Nirmal Samarasinghe, Head of Performance, Kushinda.
Interested to learn more about Microsoft Advertising Experiments + Skai?
Skai empowers the world’s leading brands and agencies across industries to manage omnichannel digital marketing campaigns. Our omnichannel marketing platform includes solutions for retail media, paid search, paid social, and app marketing.
We’ll keep you at the forefront of the digital evolution with data and insights, marketing execution, and measurement tools that work together to drive powerful brand growth.
To learn more, please schedule a brief demo to see all of our cutting-edge functionality firsthand.
