AdWords Contextual Engine Gets Biggest Upgrade Ever

AdWords also gets Display Network tab

By Chris Crum
Google announced changes to AdWords, which the company says will simplify the way advertisers buy and run display ads through AdWords.

“For nine years, AdWords customers have been buying display campaigns through an interface designed for search,” says Google’s AdWords team in a blog post. “This is like trying to run in glass slippers — it might work, but it’d be a lot more effective with the right running shoes. So we’re giving display its own tab within AdWords.”

 

The tab will roll out over the next few weeks.

In addition to the tab, Google announced a new contextual engine (the system that matches ads to pages based on keywords) update for AdWords, which the company calls the “biggest enhancement ever”. The company uploaded the following video of Director of Product Management for Display, Brad Bender, talking about both the tab and the updated engine:

Google says the update give the engine the ability to combine the reach of display with the “precision” of search using “next-gen” keyword targeting.

Some might say, however, that precision and search aren’t quite as synonymous as they oncer were in the online advertising world. There’s no question that Facebook is able to get much more precise when it comes to targeting based on demographic and interest. Google will no doubt try to improve on this with Google+ and its revamped privacy policy, but it just doesn’t have the data about web users that Facebook does.

That said, the advantage and precision of search, in comparison, comes with the fact that search ads deliver on timing when the user is actually looking for something in particular. Imagine if Google is able to get the Facebook-type data and have the best of both worlds.

On the update engine, Google says, “For example, let’s say you’re running display campaigns for a Travel Agency who offers a vacation packages in several Caribbean islands. In the past, you would have created themed ad groups targeting vacations to Turks and Caicos and the Caribbean. Now, with this new keyword level transparency you might realize that the keyword ‘Turks and Caicos vacations’ is 4 times more profitable than the keyword ‘caribbean vacations’. You can optimize your campaigns to aggressively target these high performing keywords, and be more conservative on ‘caribbean vacations’.”

Along with all of this, Google is launching a “targeting diagram” feature, to help advertisers better visualize the reach of campaigns, and see how they’re impacted by combining various targeting types.