AdWords Editor 7.0 Update – Find First Page Bid Estimates & Quality Score Problems Quickly

Paid Media / December 17, 2008

Google has quietly released AdWords Editor 7.0 this morning which includes new and long overdue features such as First Page Bid Estimates and Quality Score. You can download the new editor here http://google.com/adwordseditor/

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.