With the two-dimensional displacement measurement as an application example and based on the analysis of the generation mechanism and characteristics of laser beam drifts, a method for laser beam drift compensation is proposed by the combination of differential compensation with the common path compensation. In addition, these two compensation methods are analyzed in detail and verified by experiments. The experimental results show that, the compensation effects of the angular drift and total drift of the beam for the differential compensation method are 35.2% and 54.4%, respectively. In contrast, the compensation effect of the total drift of the beam for the common path compensation method is 42.2%. The research results can providea technical support for solving the common problem of beam drift compensation in laser alignment measurement.