About a year ago, Google Adwords released a feature that allows advertisers to see how different keyword-level bids could impact the advertising results. Like most of the other Adwords feature, figures are just estimates, but it helps advertisers to gauge the “would be” performance of a keyword if they bid on a certain level.

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.