***Important news regarding your account***

We’re writing to let you know that your AdWords account (Customer Id: XXX-XXX-XXXX) will be upgraded to the new AdWords interface within the next few business days. After that time, you’ll no longer be able to switch back to the previous AdWords interface to manage your campaigns. The new interface doesn’t change how ads run, so bidding, ranking, Quality Score, and the rest of ad serving will remain the same after the upgrade.

We think you’ll like how AdWords has changed to meet your needs. Campaign management is now more efficient, with tools and reports that are easier to find and use. We’ve continued to add features and controls based on advertiser feedback, and now the new interface is ready to use exclusively.

While the new Adwords interface is still new, Google has been frequently adding new features to it.

Navigation

One of the major improvements is the navigation. The new navigation allows you to move quickly between different data views (campaign level, ad group level and keyword level), while with the old interface the higher efficient method is to use the Report Center. Now all the campaigns and ad groups you ever need to view can be navigated via the left side menu, which can also be minimized to allow a broader view. Paused campaigns and ad groups are grayed out so that they are easily distinguished from the active ones.

All Keywords View

The second major improvement is the ability to view all your keywords in a single screen, even though your keywords reside in different campaigns.

Filter and Views

You can control the amount of data you need to view at once by filtering campaigns, ad groups or keywords:

Customized Columns

By adding or removing the columns, you can choose the metrics that you only need to see:

Chart Two Metrics

You can look at two metrics simultaneously by charting them on a single graph:

Keyword Status

In the Keyword Status window, now you can immediately see the details that influence your keyword’s quality score:

• Relevance
• Landing Page
• Landing Page Performance / Load Time

Download Campaigns, Ad Groups or Keywords as Reports

You can download your campaigns, ad groups, ads or keywords right at the campaign / ad group / keyword views and review them offline (The old interface only allows you to download reports at the Report Center):

Manage Negative Keywords

You can add and manage negative keywords at the campaign level and the ad group level all in a single screen:

Help Shortcut

The help shortcut at the bottom left corner is more visible in the new interface so that new users can have immediate access to it:

Share Feedback

After you have fully explored the Adwords new interface, you can tell Google how satisfied or unsatisfied about the changes by rating and commenting via the Share Feedback form:

• The new interface supports several languages other than English: Spanish, French, Japanese and Brazilian Portuguese.
• This new interface allows you to chart trends in two metrics simultaneously.
• You can view and edit keywords, placements or ads from all ad groups on a single tab.
• The new interface enables you to make keyword bid changes with few clicks.
• A “Networks” tab has been added to the new interface which allows you to view statistics of your placement ads and to take actions right away.
• This new interface does not change how currently bidding, ranking, Quality Score and ad serving work.
• The new interface does not have all the features that are currently available in the old interface.
• You can switch between the old and the new interfaces.

If this new Adwords Interface turns out to be a more handy tool in many ways than Adwords Editor, I would expect a few Adwords Advertisers who have been relying heavily on Adwords Editor to spend more time using it. For advertisers with hundreds of thousands of keywords to manage, it would still be easier to make bulk changes via Adwords Editor.

If you have not been included in this Beta Expansion, sign up via this New Adwords Interface page.

Adcenter stated:

You can import entire campaigns into Microsoft adCenter from other online advertising programs – complete with your original ad groups, keywords, and ads. To ensure that your content is imported correctly, use either a Microsoft Office Excel file or a CSV file, and use the same columns and column order that adCenter uses.

Yahoo! made the import of 3rd party campaigns even easier with 5 steps:

1. Download your third party campaign to a file
2. Locate your third party campaign file on your computer
3. Convert your third party campaign file
4. Download and review the converted campaign file
5. Import the converted campaign file

Although Yahoo! and Microsoft are both playing catch-up with Google on paid search marketing platforms, I believe that this is a good method to massively expand their quantity of ads. The next step would be for the two search engines to increase search market share, so those new ads will receive more click volume.

Even with the success of Google in paid search advertising over MSN and Yahoo!, it is not only because Google has a much higher search market share and a larger reach in traffic distribution partners. It is the well-designed and versatile advertising platform (Adwords) that Google has been continuously building which contributed to the success.

Flexibility

Adwords has been offering and creating many flexible features such as position preference bidding, preferred cost-bidding, ad scheduling, geo-targeting by countries and smaller regions, and language targeting in over 20 languages. Any of these features can be enabled within your Adwords account within a few clicks.

However, for instance with Yahoo! Overture it was unable to geo-target by country in a single advertising account, while Adwords allows advertisers to geo-target multiple countries or as many as countries and regions.

Time Efficiency

Adwords can provide advertisers the ease of setting up campaigns in a very time-efficient manner. Each Adwords account is structured in a logical manner: campaigns, adgroups, ads and keywords. This structure enables many arrangement possibilities, for instance the one-to-many relation of adgroup-to-keywords which makes the editing of ads really time-efficient.

Reporting and Tracking

With reporting on all levels (account, campaign, adgroup, ad and keyword), advertisers are able to easily review how their marketing budgets are distributed. On top of that, the impression share metrics were made available in some of the higher level reports.

With Google’s Adwords conversion tracking, advertisers can track their search engine marketing results by leads, purchases and sales with very detailed information. The setup of the already-built-in tracking system is as simple as copy-and-paste.

Yahoo! Overture has a similar tracking feature, however, it is limited to only track the simplest figures such as number of conversions.

Self Service

Adwords is a system that requires minimal interactions between human editorial and advertisers. The problem with Yahoo! Overture was that it required extensive human resources in reviewing ads and keywords.

Last year Google even launched a simple version of Adwords called the Starter Edition, which would allow any non-savvy person in PPC to start a simple text ad campaign within minutes, as long as they own a credit card and a website.

Yahoo! and MSN Playing Catch-up

Yahoo! realized it was time to re-develop a more versatile platform. This new Yahoo! Search Marketing system (or Panama) was set to launch in Q3 of 2006, though currently it is still migrating its user-base from the old platform (Overture).

Panama’s migration of the existing user-base could be a delay, however, its much improved usability, flexibility, reporting and conversion tracking are really important. As long as Yahoo! can improve its relevancy and then its search market share, it is not impossible that Yahoo! Search Marketing will be able to keep up with Adwords.

MSN was the late candidate in launching its paid search advertising platform, Adcenter in which its beta version came out in late 2005. From the beginning, it realized the necessity to have a platform which is flexible and well-structured. The only major issues are that MSN does not really have the high traffic volume that even Yahoo! has, and Adcenter is not yet very user-friendly comparing to Adwords.

However, it seems no matter what Yahoo! and MSN have done, Google’s traffic is growing month-on-month in the US.

Search market share in the US in April 2007 (according to Hitwise)

• Google: 65.26%
• Yahoo!: 20.73%
• MSN / Live: 8.46%
• Ask: 3.69%

Search market share in the US in March 2007 (according to Hitwise)

• Google: 64.13%
• Yahoo!: 21.26%
• MSN: 9.15%
• Ask: 3.48%

Search market share in the US in April 2006 (according to Hitwise)

• Google: 58.64%
• Yahoo!: 22.21%
• MSN: 12.59%
• Ask: 4.22%

• Sign up an Adwords account via a one-page form.
• Create up to 50 ads with multiple keywords for your business.
• View a single page of overview of the impressions, clicks and costs of your ads.
• Set geo-targeting on a single city or country.
• Upgrade to the Standard Edition at any time. However, once you have upgraded a Standard Edition account, it is not reversible.
• Set up a hosted business web page from within Adwords, without knowledge of HTML coding, if you don’t already have a business website.

From the last point above, we can see that Google has the intention to extent Starter Edition for the use of many common people who really know nothing about Adwords. Here is the evidence shown on Inside Adwords Blog, in which Google is even promoting the Starter Edition to local business owners without websites.

A hosted business page is an informational webpage that new advertisers can create when they sign up for AdWords Starter Edition. You can use a hosted business page to tell people more about your business when they click on your ad.

Hosted business pages are now available for new US advertisers using AdWords Starter Edition. It’s important to note that a hosted business page is not a full-featured website with its own domain name, but rather a single landing page for your AdWords ads. Hosted business pages are free with a new AdWords account, and can be set up with no knowledge of HTML.

So how do you know if you need to upgrade to the Standard Edition?

• When you want to advertising for more than one product.
• When you need to set geo-targeting to more than one locations.
• When you need to track the performance of your keywords based on advertising spend.
• When you want to try out content targeting or site targeting.
• When you need to set different bid prices between search targeting ads and content targeting ads.
• When you have to use Adwords built-in functions like Position Preference.

Here you can find a comparison chart on Starter Edition and Standard Edition.

Is there any value of using Adwords Starter Edition?

I believe Starter Edition is a basic tool which can be good for business branding. Its functionality is very limited, and obviously anyone who considers using Adwords seriously will not use it. It is rather designed for beginners of the Adwords program who:

• Want to quickly set up a few ads for a single product.
• Want to bring online exposure for their businesses.
• Do not need to track their advertising spend according to the results.