Experiment with ads in v201101

Monday, April 11, 2011


When introduced last year, AdWords Campaign Experiments (ACE) allowed for experimental changes to be applied to ad groups and criteria. To allow for even greater flexibility, in v201101 we’ve added the ability to apply experimental changes to individual ads as well. Just like other entities, experiment data can be added to an AdGroupAd to indicates its status in the experiment. For example, the following code can be used to add an existing ad to the experimental split.

// Create ad using an existing ID.
$ad = new Ad();
$ad->id = $adId;

// Create ad group ad.
$adGroupAd = new AdGroupAd();
$adGroupAd->adGroupId = $adGroupId;
$adGroupAd->ad = $ad;
$adGroupAd->status = 'ENABLED';

// Create experiment data for experiment-only split.
$experimentData = new AdGroupAdExperimentData();
$experimentData->experimentId = $experimentId;
$experimentData->experimentDeltaStatus = 'EXPERIMENT_ONLY';
$adGroupAd->experimentData = $experimentData;

// Create operation.
$operation = new AdGroupAdOperation();
$operation->operator = 'SET';
$operation->operand = $adGroupAd;
$operations = array($operation);

// Update ad.
$result = $adGroupAdService->mutate($operations);


Experiment data can only be used to include or exclude an ad from an experiment; all other properties of the ad will remain the same. If you have any questions about setting up experiments with the API you can ask us on the forum.

- Eric Koleda, AdWords API Team