On Monday, Microsoft announced that cookie-based experiments are now available on Microsoft Advertising. If the option is selected, the customer will only be shown ads from experiments or the original campaigns when he/she searches.
This option will allow you to create duplicates of campaigns and test them on a segment of its traffic, whether an update works great for your businesses or not. The cookie-based experimenting option will ensure that once a consumer is shown a version of an ad, he/she will continue to be shown the same version of the ad.
This action will hopefully facilitate more accurate testing of creative as well as ad copy since the consumer is only responding to either the experiment or the original campaign.
While this might yield a bit more accurate data for many experiments, it might also take longer time to accumulate statistically essential comparison data as opposed to if one did a search-based experiment. That's why Microsoft recommends one to set experiment split at 50 per cent to obtain enough volume faster and make comparisons more easily. The first A/B testing tool for Microsoft was rolled out in July last year.
