Comment by steve8918
13 years ago
I actually noticed that Google was doing this with my Adwords account a couple of weeks ago.
I have 2 ads in an Ad Group, and the wording between the two is different by a single word. One ad had over double the clickthru rate than the other one, just because of that single word difference.
I noticed that Google was serving the two ads about 50% of the time, and was going to shut off the one ad that had the lower CTR, but then I let it go, and the next day, I saw that the more successful ad had almost all the views, and the less successful one was barely being served.
Yea this is an option in the Adwords interface, it is enabled by default but can be turned off. Google probably discovered that most of their advertisers don't check on their ad results very often and added the auto optimization so that they could show the better ads and make more profits even without the users interaction.