In many-body-localized systems, an extensive number of local conserved quantities, or integrals of motion, exists and prevents thermalization at all energies. Despite much theoretical progress, an experimental characterization of many-body localization is still lacking  to date. One problem is that even though logarithmic entanglement growth is a characteristic of many-body-localized systems, it is not readily accessible through experiments. We propose to study the time evolution of a particular many-body initial state, a charge-density wave, which due to its extensive overlap with integrals of motion can act as a macroscopic order parameter for localization. Moreover, we show how (temporal) fluctuations in this order parameter are connected to the entanglement-entropy growth. Cold-atom experiments provide a natural platform for the proposed measurements and recent progress in this direction will be discussed.