New Features in Google AdWords

The Google AdWords development team has been busy, and over the past few weeks have launched some interesting features for pay-per-click managers. In this short article, we'll take a look at these new features.

Minimum Bid replaced by Estimated First Page Bid

Previously, you might have had some keywords inactivated by Google due to a minimum bid that was too low. Their calculation took into consideration click-through-rate and quality score, and made a determination about the smallest bid they would allow for your keyword to be eligible to show. That has now changed.

Instead, Google is helping advertisers to focus on what bid is required to keep ads appearing on the first page of results. At the keyword level, this information is displayed in the Status column, but only if your bid is too low. When setting up the columns for a keyword report, there is also now a check box to display the estimated first page bid for every keyword.

This change has a couple of impacts; first, it means that long tail keywords won't be deactivated due to a low CTR. Secondly, it makes it easy to see keywords that are at risk of dropping onto the second page of results.

Build Your Own Display Ad

The idea here is to allow advertisers to create their own graphic ads to use with Google's site targeting capability, without the need for a professional graphic designer. I like the idea - site targeting is something that more companies should be experimenting with.

However, after a few trial runs with the ad builder tool, I'm not convinced that it will get widespread use by PPC management practitioners.

Here's why:

1. The number of templates is fairly limited (about 50).
2. The tool requires image files to be a max of 50kb, which is probably not typical for company logos or stock imagery. So, the user will have to know how to re-save their image at a lower resolution.
3. The tool doesn't seem to do a very good job at resizing uploaded images to fit properly in the ad space. As a result, my designs using the tool looked very amateurish.
4. The tool only deems to create ads in two sizes, which does not include the popular 120x600 (vertical banner), and 468x60 (horizontal banner). It's entirely possible that Google will expand the functionality and ease of use of the tool, but right now, I think these limitations give it very limited appeal.

Additional Note - at the time of writing, none of these changes had been incorporated into AdWords Editor. Google advised me to cease using features inside AdWords Editor that no longer apply (such as the advanced bidding option to increase all bids to the minimum for a keyword to be active), since it wasn't clear which keywords would be affected and how.

Search Results Now Differentiate Google and the Search Network

Hopefully you already have separate campaigns for Search and Content match types to optimize Google AdWords results.

Now Google has increased magnification one more level and is separating results for Google Search and their Partner Network as separate numbers. Google Search are simply searches performed on Google's site. Search partners include AOL, Ask.com, and many other search sites around the web, who run a search box 'powered' by Google. Smart marketers will begin to run separate campaigns for Google Search and the Partner Network. (Hint: Google's free tool AdWords Editor is great for copying and pasting campaigns.) The option to enable or disable Search Network is under Campaign Settings.

Mat Greenfield has been in web marketing since 1996. He is recognized as a website conversion and pay-per-click management expert by a number of industry organizations including Register.com, Constant Contact, and Inside Sales.com. He is a web marketing consultant, author, and trainer, and has worked with companies such as Novell, BugTrack, and Franklin Covey. Get more info at: http://www.conversionresults.com