AdWords Campaign Experiments (aka ACE) to sunset in favor of Drafts & Experiments

Retirement of the legacy testing tool will begin the week of October 17

Google will soon retire AdWords Campaign Experiments. All advertisers will be transitioned to the newer Drafts & Experiments tool for trialing proposed campaign changes, the company announced Monday.

Drafts & Experiments arrived in AdWords in February for search campaigns and extended to display campaigns in August.

Drafts is sort of like AdWords Editor in that it allows you to make multiple edits to a campaign without the changes going live until they are posted. From a draft, advertisers can run an experiment — designating a portion of the budget to the test — to see how the changes might impact performance.

Advertisers will no longer be able to create new Campaign Experiments starting the week of October 17. Exiting active Campaign Experiments have until February 1, 2017, to run, after which unapplied changes will be removed.