Thanks to SERoundtable for catching this earlier today. Some of details found in the release notes include:

• First page bid estimates: the Editor now uses first page bid estimates for your keywords and Minimum cost-per-click (CPC) bids are no longer used.
• Keyword Quality Score: The Keywords tab now displays the Quality Score for your keywords. [Finally!]
• Keyword Opportunities locale: Tailor your keyword suggestions to a particular language and location by changing your Keyword Opportunities locale.
• Campaign targeting in the data view: You can view your targeting settings in the new ‘Language’ and ‘Location’ columns on the Campaigns tab. These columns are hidden by default, but you can select them with the column chooser.
• Send feedback to Google: Help us improve AdWords Editor by enabling usage tracking in your AdWords Editor settings.
• Absolute Numbers for Volume in Keyword Opportunities Tool: The ‘Volume’ column on the Keyword expansion tab of the Keyword Opportunities tool now shows absolute numbers (traffic for the last month) instead of scaled values.
• Keyword Opportunities tool isn’t available for draft accounts.

Overall, the two major updates that should help speed up day-to-day optimizations of your AdWords campaigns are the addition of First Page Bid Estimates and Quality Score data in the Editor. You can quickly spot problem keywords across your multiple campaigns without having to go through the web interface or extracting reports. Here’s how the new data looks like:

So, how can we make use of this? Here are a few ideas…

2 Filters To Catch Problems Quickly

You can make use of the Advanced Search feature in the “Create or Set Custom View” tool to apply filters on your campaigns, identify potential problem areas and take action.

1. Spot Low Quality Score Keywords

If you want to make sure that you didn’t miss any low QS keywords that may be lurking in your campaign, using a filter in the editor will save you lots of time. Simply select the new option for Quality Score and apply a filter to match Quality Score criteria (when you spot problem keywords, go back in the web interface to get more insights as to potential problems):

2. Spot Keywords With Max CPC lower than First Page Bid Estimates

In some cases, you may be bidding too low for your ads to appear on the first page. Through the web interface, Google alerts you of these potential problems but again, you have to navigate through each Ad Group to spot them. By using the new data in AdWords Editor 7.0, you can apply 2 filters to find where your Max CPC is lower than your First Page Bid Estimates. Unfortunately, you’ll need to repeat a few times and use a variety of values as you can conditionally sort something like: Max CPC is less than First Page Bid Estimates.

Look out for Google’s official announcement shortly and as pointed out here and here, let’s hope there are less bugs than in version 6.5.

Well, it’s now fixed with the 6.5.1 update.

Keyword Opportunities

Sporting quite a few improvements, Version 6.5 added a new tool called Keyword Opportunities which helps you generate keyword ideas based on descriptive words or phrases within the Editor and copy or add them right into a new or existing adgroup.  You can learn more about the new feature here.

The only problem was the keyword opportunity tool didn’t work when loading an account through your My Client Center (MCC) login. Those affected – myself and our team included – saw the error message “Authentication Failed” when trying to use the tool. The only workaround was to load the account using the login of the “child account”.

What’s next?

Besides having recurring problems installing AdWords Editor over an existing version on Vista (to my knowledge, it’s still an issue but I don’t have that problem on Mac but they do keep changing a few key Mac shortcuts which is a real pain), using the Keyword Opportunities at the MCC level was in need of a fix.

Let’s hope with that out of the way, the next release will include First Page Bids and Quality Score.

See the release notes for Version 6.5.1.

What We Were Looking For

What we were looking for was a simple way to centralize our contacts and the interactions we have in collaborative way for our team. When the team at 37Signals launched Highrise last year, we were already familiar and using some of their other suite of solutions like Basecamp. We started testing out Highrise from day 1 and have never looked back!

Why We Love Highrise

Highrise is simple, effective and allows us to get down to business with a clean and highly efficient interface. We can quickly review the pulse of our communications, assign tasks to our team, and stay on top of time-sensitive and mission critical exchanges with our clients, partners and team members. Not to mention, it’s actually fun to use!

Not a week goes by that we are not recommending a client, partner or friend to try it out and see why we’re telling them that Highrise is truly a tool that enables you to focus on what you do best – in our case, making campaigns bloom!

Update: Thanks to the team at 37 signals for featuring this post on the Highrise Product Blog.