Many of you have used the Opportunities tab to find keyword, bid, and budget ideas for your account. With each optimization idea, we provide estimates for how these ideas may affect your impressions, clicks, and cost. Now you can test these optimization ideas on your own campaigns when you run experiments in the Opportunities tab.

This new feature uses AdWords Campaign Experiments to run experiments on the keyword and bid ideas in your Opportunities tab. Experiments run on 50% of your AdWords traffic for thirty days, during which time you’ll have the chance to compare your original campaign setup with your test setup. You can decide at any time whether you want to apply your experiment settings to 100% of your traffic. If you take no action after thirty days, your experimental changes will be applied to your campaign automatically.

The ability to run experiments in the Opportunities tab has already launched in some English-language accounts and will be available to all English-language accounts over the next few days.

Start an experiment in just a few clicks:

1. Select keyword or bid ideas you want to test.
2. Select the checkbox for "Evaluate this idea for up to 30 days."
3. Click "Apply now."

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Keyword experiment setup in the Opportunities tab

Monitor your experiment performance:

When your experiment is running, you’ll be able to monitor your experiment performance from the Ideas page of the Opportunities tab.

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Monitoring experiment performance in the Opportunities tab

You’ll also be able to view performance statistics for individual keywords and bids on the Keywords tab when you segment by "Experiment."

For those of you who have wanted to try ACE but didn’t know what to test, this should help get you started. This is also a great feature for those of you who want to see a positive performance improvement before making changes to all of your traffic.

No matter how your new keywords and bids perform relative to your original setup, you’ll leave your experiment with more knowledge than you had previously, which means every experiment is a good experiment.

Posted by Lisa Shieh, Inside AdWords crew