Google AdWords: 5 New Features That You Need to Know About

Google has released new AdWords features this year with the goal of helping improve performance, making management easier, or showing additional data. Will these new features help or hinder your campaigns? Explore the details and decide how the changes may impact your individual advertising goals.

1. Ad Rotation Changes

Ad rotation settings in AdWords offers three options: optimize for clicks, optimize for conversions, and rotate evenly. The rotate evenly setting is commonly used for testing ad creative, and when it is used, it can negatively impact performance, especially when one of the ad versions is poor.

Rolled out in early May, the “rotate evenly” ad rotation setting will function differently than in the past. Google will now only rotate ads evenly for a period of 30 days instead of rotating ads indefinitely. After 30 days it will default to the “optimize for clicks” setting. Each new ad will begin a 30-day period.

There is no way to opt out, so it’s important to know that this setting will change automatically whether advertisers want it or not. After 30 days, if you are not done testing your ads, you will need to edit the ad to trigger a new 30-day period.

2. Match Type Changes

Starting in mid-May, phrase and exact match keywords will be triggered by close variants, including misspellings, plural forms, singular forms, different stemmings, accents, and abbreviations. According to Google, “At least 7% of search queries contain a misspelling, and the longer the query, the higher the rate.”

An example of how this would be applied is a keyword “carpet cleaning” including “carpet clean.” Advertisers should check their accounts for any keywords for which this new setting may be a problem. This would include keywords where an exact match is critical to the bottom line. Advertisers can opt out of this in AdWords under the campaign settings tab, in advanced settings under keyword matching options. For many advertisers, reaching additional searches will be a big benefit.

3. Location Targeting Enhancements

Many advertisers know one of the powerful benefits to PPC is reaching local searches. In April, Google introduced three new features to improve local targeting.

• Zip code targeting: New ability to target more than 30,000 U.S. Zip codes in AdWords. Advertisers can include up to 1,000 postal codes per campaign. Reporting is also offered at the Zip code level, providing very granular insights into campaign performance.
• Location insertion: Within location extensions, this new feature allows advertisers to dynamically update ad title, text, display URL, or destination URL with city, phone number, or Zip code of the local business into the ad text without manually creating these components for geo-targeting ads.
• Advanced location targeting: Allows exclusion or targeting of locations using either physical location or location of interest; for example, in searches with a geo-modifier like “shoes stores in Tulsa.”

4. Auction Insights Report

Google last week said it’s launching a reporting feature, Auction Insights, that shows advertisers who competes with them in keyword auctions. The competitive URL is shown along with five different statistics: impression share, average position of advertiser and competitor, overlap rate of when both ads are show, position above rate, and top of page percent.

Initial launch of this report is for single keywords only, and data is provided only to May 1, 2012.

5. Account Labels

A seemingly small enhancement, Account Labels, is actually an exciting new feature that can help to organize AdWords accounts. Announced in late April, labels enable advertisers to organize accounts’ keywords, ads, ad groups, and campaigns into custom groupings for easier filtering and reporting.

This feature complements a smart account structure. Examples of how to use the labels:

• Campaigns by brand or non-brand
• Label specific product categories
• Differentiate geographically targeting campaigns
• Label promotional campaigns

Once labels are in place, you can filter by this label and run reports to aggregate performance by label.