Starting this month and continuing over the next few weeks, Google AdWords is introducing some changes that are meant to make it even easier to use the popular website-promoting and ad-placement tool. As ever, the latest slew of updates targets two critical factors: becoming more accurate and becoming more user-friendly.
The primary adjustment is to its secretive algorithm, which determines how to rank and analyze certain keywords in order to match and rank content.
For starters, AdWords will now allow advertisers to place ads based on more specific keywords. Instead of trying to match content using less descriptive means, marketers can choose the narrowest and most niche keywords so that their creative appears only next to extremely specific phrases and articles. And, of course, they’ll be able to track how certain keywords fare as compared to others in order to determine what those designations should be. Google is calling this option “next-gen keyword contextual targeting.”
And it’s important to note that this upgrade is coming along with a new and easy to use display grid that makes it simple to manage and monitor these campaigns.
In terms of targeting and tweaking campaigns, Google will be releasing a visualization aid that shows marketers how their campaign is faring on a grid that will help them quickly locate and assess the information they’ve collected. This graphic map plugs into analytics data and can be reorganized according to specific features that are an individual advertiser’s top priorities, such as keyword, location or topic. The Google AdWords visualization aid provides a bird’s eye view of trends, clusters and other historical data.
What do you think of these updates? And what other changes do you think AdWords still needs to stay at the top of its game in an increasingly competitive Web marketing world?