Run an experiment from an opportunity

Experiments suggested by Ad Manager let you use actual network traffic to test how applying an opportunity would impact revenue. Ad Manager suggests opportunities and experiments based on trends and data from across your network. When you run one of these experiments, the experiment appears on the "Experiments" page and the opportunity related to this experiment disappears from the "Opportunities" page.

To see a list of all of your available opportunities, click Optimization ​​ Opportunities. To see a list of all of your active experiments, click Optimization  Experiments.

Up to 100 active experiments can exist in your Ad Manager network at any given time. Active experiments include experiments that are running, paused, or have completed and are waiting for you to take action.

To run an experiment from an opportunity, you will:

• Select the opportunity you want to test.
• Define an experiment trial and let the trial run for a specified amount of time.
• Edit conditions to automatically pause the experiment, or disable auto-pause for the experiment.
• Compare the impression traffic allocated to the "variation" group with the traffic allocated to the "control" group to see which performed better during the experiment.
• Run additional trials, if needed.
• Decide whether to apply the experiment settings to your Ad Manager network.

You can also run a manual experiment if you want to select the experiment settings yourself.

Run an experiment

Complete the following steps to run an experiment from an opportunity:

1. Sign in to Google Ad Manager.
2. Find an opportunity with an available experiment.
3. Click Experiment to create a new experiment trial. Each experiment may have up to 10 trials.
4. Edit the name of the experiment, or use the default name.
5. Set a start date and an end date for the experiment trial.
   • Start date: Each trial needs to run for at least 7 days to improve the chance of reaching conclusive results. You can schedule a trial to start immediately, or specify a later date. All trials start at 12:00 am and end at 11:59 pm on the scheduled dates in your local time zone, and data is refreshed daily. If you set the start date to the current day, the trial will start within the next hour.
   • End date: Each experiment trial can run up to 31 days total. When the trial ends, you can review and evaluate the results to decide whether you want to apply it as an opportunity, run another trial, or end the experiment and keep the original settings. 
6. Set the percentage of impression traffic to allocate to the experiment.
7. Set up to 10 auto-pause conditions, selecting Cumulative or Daily for each condition:
   • Cumulative: The amount of revenue loss that will pause an experiment within the duration of the trial.
   • Daily: The amount of revenue loss that will pause an experiment within the last full day of data.
     Note: Auto-pause will check that results meet the conditions specified once per day. To ensure experiments aren’t paused before they have had a chance to collect data, trials won’t be paused within the first 24 hours of starting. To avoid sampling errors, trials will only be paused based on statistically significant results. For example, trials will be paused when the lower bound of a 95% confidence interval meets the necessary threshold.
8. Click Start experiment.