Changes to Adwords

Greenlight, a social search and marketing company, predicts that by the end of 2012, 90 percent of advertisers’ search budgets will be devoted to AdWords. Towards this goal, Google will roll out several changes to its money-making advertising platform on January 30. What has changed, and how will it affect marketers?
Changes include:

1. Google will offer impression share metrics reports at the ad group level. Marketers will be able to see which ad groups are not “capturing the majority of available impressions,” or underperforming.
2. Ad group reports will have three new columns; some complain that this is going to bury important information, so you have to be able to sort it out. The columns are: Impr. Share, the percentage of impressions received divided by impressions you were eligible for; Lost IS (Rank), the share of impressions that were lost because of your Ad Rank; and Exact Match IS (Search Network only), the percentage of impressions you receive for exact match keyword searches divided by the estimated number of exact match impressions you were eligible for.
3. Algorithm updates for more accurate campaign impression share metrics, including refined campaign-level statistics and once-daily updates.
4. Users will be able to set up as many as 100 automated rules (such as increase bids, decrease bids, pause keywords when…, enable keywords when…), an increase of 90.
5. Users will also be able to undo changes made by one or more of these rules simply by clicking “Undo.”

And, arguably the biggest news:

1. Google will allow two enhanced mobile features: Wi-Fi targeting and targeting based on operating system. The first will allow you to target campaigns to mobile users on a Wi-Fi connection. This expands the reach of your campaign, and will also help if your ad, campaign, and/or landing page has high bandwidth content that you still want users to access.

The second mobile feature is an expansion: you can already target campaigns based on OS, but in February, you will be allowed to limit views to specific versions of those operating systems, such as iOS 4.0 or Android 3.0 and above. Google calls this a more “granular” approach, and it can allow you to target the right users when offering an application or service specific to one of these systems.
While the reports will look different and you might have to root around to find the information you need, the enhancements to AdWords can help you make your next PPC campaign more effective and successful.

Posted by Gurdeep Matharu, Senior Account & Business Development Manager at Bullseye Media