My search on the liquor though showed that Google doesn’t feel the same way towards Facebook. The lone ad showing on the results page I got was a Facebook Fan Page.

According to Google Adwords Help, “when determining which ads to show on a Google search result page, the AdWords system considers the user’s current search term as well as some of the user’s previous searches during the same search session. If the system detects a relationship, it’ll show ads related to these other terms, too”. According to their definition of session-based broad match, “The search term is considered to be a variation of a keyword from your account, based on previous searches that the user has done during his or her search session”.

The Display Campaign Optimizer helps in managing the targeting and bidding in the display network campaigns. To use the Display Campaign Optimizer though, your campaign needs to have Conversion Optimizer set up and Target CPA bidding enabled. As of the moment though, DCO is only available to a small group of qualified advertisers, but it will become available to more advertisers over the coming months.

Just like the DCO, the Contextual Targeting Tool is only available to a select few advertisers but will also be available to all advertisers in the coming months. This toll helps advertisers build a tightly themed keyword list for the Display Network campaigns. This tool makes the campaign more effective, while assisting the advertisers to do job of segmenting easier.

Below is a list of the new features:

1. Longer, customizable Conversion history Window – the default was 30 days, now the advertiser has the option to go 60 or even 90 days.
2. Only show conversion paths – the advertiser will now have the capability to sanitize the search funnel data, which excludes conversion paths that may have been diluted by deleted cookies in the browser.

Please click on the link below to read the full article:

New Features in Search Funnels – Inside AdWords.

Late last week they added a new dimension into this feature. Bid simulator now has “Estimated Top Impressions“. This metric which shows the advertisers how many times an ad appeared above the search results in the past seven days and how this metric could have changed had they used different keyword level maximum CPC bids.

image taken from the Inside Adwords blog

Google Adwords implicitly says this though. “Note that past performance does not guarantee future results, and simulations will only be provided if there is enough traffic on a given keyword to conduct a meaningful analysis”.

This additional feature when used the right way though, could surely help in optimizing keyword bids.

Although we can read a lot of blogs and articles questioning the accuracy of the data spewed out by this tool, it’s still good to know Google still has the intent of providing us tools to make the job easier. Google claims though that the have changed how the tool calculates the global monthly searches as well as the local monthly searches.

And they promised more features in the near future.

Updated Keyword Tool: Out of Beta – Inside AdWords.

Well, a lot of things have changed. It’s now easier generating reports. No exports and downloads are necessary. Columns and arrangements can now be edited easily. And a lot more.

There are still things the Adwords team have to do though. Like I’m not able to show conversions on a per hour basis. I can get the impressions, and clicks per hour, but no conversions. which means I will still have to login to my Google Analytics account to pull out the hourly conversion data.

In an overall perspective though, Adwords did a good job on the reporting side of things. Below is a recap of the changes from the official Adwords blog.

A few updates on reporting in AdWords – Inside AdWords.

Below are 2 very good articles that covers these questions:L

How Adwords Counts Ad Impressions with Google Instant
Google Instant – 10 Things Marketing Teams Need to Know

Here’s a gist from the above-mentioned articles:

How impressions are counted

When someone searches using Google Instant, ad impressions are counted in these situations:

• The user begins to type a query on Google and clicks anywhere on the page (a search result, an ad, a spell correction, a related search).
• The user chooses a particular query by clicking the Search button, pressing Enter, or selecting one of the predicted queries.
• The user stops typing, and the results are displayed for a minimum of three seconds.

Read the full article from the PPC Blog post below:

Google AdWords 4th Ad Slot Above Organic Search Results ~ PPC Blog.

Just recently though, one of my favorite SEO/SEM blogs posted a very good view on Google’s Ad Auction factors as they call it. Here are the links to their posts:

Google Quality Score
Google Ad Rank