Evolving Testing Objectives

There was a time when we needed to know whether technology would be effective or not. Thus, testing was born. Nowadays, however, the word ‘testing’ has become a scapegoat response to anyone who does not know what to do with a new tech product. If your first instinct when Google releases a new feature or ad format is to test, then you likely have it all wrong.

Google slowly started removing campaign settings that would change the behavior of a campaign depending on that setting. As an example, Ad Delivery could previously be set to Standard or Accelerated, giving advertisers the option for Google to choose the better ad for the auction or not. This is no longer an option available in campaign settings. Many other settings are also rendered irrelevant when Auction-time Bidding is implemented such as bid modifiers for ad schedules.

So now, if the question testing is trying to answer is no longer ‘does it work or not’, then what is the new question?

Quite simply, it’s ‘how do I get this to work’?

If we all stopped at a binary, ‘did it work or not’, then we would have very little options to work with. For instance, if automated bid strategies were not set up properly, then we would just continue to be bidding manually. This would cause us to lose out to time savings and additional signals that Google allows us to take advantage of when using an advance bidding option.

In the same example, if the first attempt did not yield the right results, then we can scrutinize different elements of the bid strategy configuration, adjust and test again. This ongoing process will eventually yield the right results for a sustained period, allowing us to benefit from advanced technology.

Testing is really not about a binary answer. It is much more important to conduct iterative adjustments to arrive at the right configuration for tech products out there. As platforms continue to remove options and limit our control, we need to get better at feeding platforms the data it needs to operate to our advantage. 

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