Google Ad Planner Gets Several New Enhancements

Google has released several new features for Google Ad Planner. Google says these are aimed at providing a more granular view of where your audience can be found. Features include subdomain data, ad placements, and reach and relevance at a glance.

When Google says reach and relevance at a glance, it is referring to a new interactive graph feature, which lets advertisers see which sites in their plan provide the best reach and relevance.

"In its default setting, the graph will compare sites in your search results by audience reach and composition index," explains Google's Katrina Kurnit. "Sites with the most reach will appear in the top-left quadrant. Sites with the most relevance will appear in the bottom-right quadrant. Sites near the top-right quadrant will have the best combination of both reach and relevance."

Users can customize the graph in a number of different ways. The feature is discussed in more detail on this page.

 Google has added subdomain data that gives you more detailed views of sites. It can help users refine their media plan by providing more info on specific pages. It lets usres search for subdomains, view the top subdomains based on total domain traffic for a site, view traffic, demographics and other data for the subdomain itself, and add subdomains to their media plan.

The Ad Placements feature consists of specific sections of a site where advertising can be purchased. This feature allows advertisers to review placement data for sites in the Google Content Network, and beta test publishers using Google Ad Manager. Google says more placement data will be coming soon.

Google says publishers and site owners can now use Google Ad Planner to share more Google Analytics data points like page views, unique visitors, total visits, average visits per visitor, and average time on site.

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AdWords Opportunities Expanded to More Advertisers

Earlier in the summer Google began beta testing the Opportunities Tab in AdWords. This is a feature in advertisers' accounts that tries to point them to additional cost-effective traffic for their search campaigns.

Google is now expanding the beta to more advertisers in the United States, as well as in the United Kingdom and Australia. Google says over the next few business days, they will expand the beta to all English-language accounts.

"You can think of the Opportunities tab as your homepage for account optimization. You can use the tab to get a quick overview of Google's customized keyword and budget ideas for your campaigns and ad groups," says Amanda Kelly of Google's Inside AdWords crew. "You can also compare the impact of different ideas before making changes. So, if you're looking to increase your keyword coverage for a specific product, or have your ads appear more often for your existing keywords, the Opportunities tab is a great place to start."

Ideas in the Opportunities tab change, so just because you see a list of ideas one day, does not necessarily mean that you'll see that same list all the time.

Google is not getting rid of any other AdWords tools, but they've changed the location of some. Those who are included in the beta test won't see the Tools tab, but instead will be able to access AdWords tools by clicking on the Opportunities tab, and scrolling down the menu. There is a "more tools" link that will show the full list.

"Ultimately we want the Opportunities section of your account to evolve into a single destination you can visit whenever you want to get new ideas for increasing your ad coverage on relevant search terms, capturing additional clicks in your most profitable campaigns, or simply improving your overall ROI," says Kelly.

Google says it hopes to provide a broader set of optimization tools in the future, and that the Opportunities tab is just a starting point for this. Users can expect more changes to come, and the plan is to take the beta testing to advertisers all over the world in the coming weeks.

 

Google Does Some AdWords Experimenting

Google has been messing around with AdWords ads on search results a bit this week. Earlier this week, you may have started noticing that the ads have been pushed into the left, making for results pages feeling a bit more compact.

Presumably, the move was to inspire more clicks. The sponsored results are now closer to the organic results, and may be noticed by searchers a little more. The growing adoption of wider screens may also play a role.

In addition to this change, Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to a WebmasterWorld thread, where someone noticed a new form of ad that shows a product image at the top right area above the regular AdWords ads. He provides the following screenshot:

"At Google, we're constantly experimenting with new features, tools and visual representations to improve the user experience and usefulness of our ads," the company told Schwartz when questioned about the ad. "In accordance with that philosophy, we're planning a beta test to show richer product information in the ads for shopping-related queries. This test will only be visible to a small number of U.S. users."

A keynote and Q&A with AdWords Business Product Management Director Nicholas Fox at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose provided some additional details about what Google is doing with AdWords. The company is even looking at matching information about your product or service and automatically building ads based on crawling your site.

Facebook Shows a Glimpse of Twitterness

Facebook confused some users when it accidentally invited too many people to a beta test of what is being referred to as "Facebook Lite." Facebook Lite is basically a stripped down verson of the social network, which includes just status updates, likes, and comments, without things like activity stories, app stories, and embedded content.

Facebook Lite has been compared to Twitter and FriendFeed, due to its simplicity. This was probably particularly interesting to those users who experienced it, since Facebook just acquired FriendFeed, and Facebook has been known to go for more Twitter-esque approaches in some areas.

Was this a sign of Facebook to come? Not really. Facebook Lite is a version of Facebook being tested for countries with low-bandwidth. Inside Facebook offers screenshots like this one:

Yes, it does look quite similar to Twitter. Nicholas Carlson at Silicon Alley Insider makes a good point in that even if Facebook isn't really going this direction, it still highlights the fact that at its core Facebook isn't all that different from Twitter. Sure, it has some more bells and whistles, but at the end of the day, it's main functions are very similar.

Who knows though? Twitter has a while to go before it reaches Facebook status, but if one day Twitter were to surpass Facebook in users, Facebook could conceivably go for something more like Facebook Lite. As noted, Facebook has done a variety of things that made it more like Twitter, and as you may recall, Facebook has been willing to implement radical redesigns, even when many users clearly objected.

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