Let us try to understand how you can choose to apply ideas as experiments in the Analytics Opportunities tab. Basically, you need to take into consideration the potential impact of any keyword ideas, bid ideas,; budget ideas, taking into account their relevancy, ideally with the help of experts.

As we’ve recommended in an earlier post, you should run an Adwords campaign with requisite changes for a couple of weeks at least in order to gauge their impact on the overall campaign performance.

• It is advisable to track the results from your changes through the performance reports in a Campaigns tab or free reporting tools like conversion tracking. After you choose to apply the suggested changes in the Opportunities tab, you cannot revert back automatically to your previous campaign settings.
• You can though, make changes to your campaign manually at your discretion. Some of the changes to your campaign keywords can be adding, editing, or delete key campaign terms; changing your keyword matching options; and adjusting the CPC bids.
• You can also adjust your daily budget limit without any difficulty. From a broader campaign perspective, you can either resume or stop an ad group as well any campaign as a whole. All approved changes applied to your campaign are shown in My Change History section of your account. This can help you decide the major changes effected in your campaign.

If you would like to do a quick check on both bid and keyword ideas in the Opportunities tab, following are the steps for setting up an experiment:

1. To select a keyword or bid idea for testing purpose, select checkbox just next to the idea. Then click Evaluate ideas button, or, click the relevant idea to see details and use Evaluate this idea’ checkbox.
2. Pick a start-end dateline for your experiment. Select an end date at least a week’s time from the start date, and no more than three months.
3. Monitor the performance from the ‘Ideas’ page Experiments table as long as it is active. You may apply or cancel an experiment at any given point of time before the actual end date.
4. AdWords can send reminder through an email as a campaign maintenance alert for active experiments approaching their respective end dates.
5. To make sure you get this mail, see to it that Campaign maintenance alerts has been set to ‘All’ from the ‘Notification settings’ under ‘My account’.

Statistical significance

What it means is that the end outcome of any experiment cannot simply be a chance event or something accidental. Three distinct scenarios on the experiments you run are reported in the Opportunities tab:

Red denotes that the percentage change is rather statistically significant and might have a negative impact on your campaign. On the other hand, green suggests that the percentage change is statistically significant from a positive perspective, whereas gray points to a neutral percentage change in terms of statistical significant.

If the percentage change level in metrics like clicks and impressions are not statistically significant, it is possible the experiment hasn’t had any palpable impact on the campaign. At the very beginning of an experiment, if you notice a change, which perhaps matters to you, albeit not statistically significant, let the experiment remain active for a month’s trial.

This will give it more time and scope to accrue requisite data such that the change may or may not emerge as being statistically significant.