The team at Google Adwords have been working hard to make things easier to use. Seems like Google are always ‘tweaking’ stuff hey (an interesting point for your own business model!). However, these latest changes are designed to make your campaign planning faster and more accurate. Their goal has beento reduce the guesswork involved with building new campaigns. To do so they’re rolled out improvements to the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator.

Improvements to the Keyword Tool

To help improve campaign management, the improvements to the Keyword Tool include:

• Seeing keyword ideas grouped by themes: With the updated Keyword Tool, you can easily view suggestions for new ad group themes and quickly choose to add ad groups directly to your account.
• Seamless Traffic Estimator integration: Easily view Traffic Estimator data for the keywords you select in the Keyword Tool to make better campaign strategy decisions.

Improvements to Traffic Estimator

They’ve updated the Traffic Estimator to help advertisers build a more effective bidding and budgeting strategy. Changes to the Traffic Estimator include:

• Graph your performance estimates: Introduced a graph to the Traffic Estimator to make it easier to gauge traffic and bid estimates and develop an effective bidding strategy.
• Structure your keywords into ad groups: You can now create draft ad groups within the Traffic Estimator and easily view traffic and bid estimates for each of your draft ad groups.
• Add campaigns to your account: When you’re satisfied with your campaign structure, you can add the draft campaign directly to your account.

They’ve also improved the quality and accuracy of the traffic estimates by using performance history to better gauge traffic estimates. This means that going forward you’ll have to log in to AdWords to use Traffic Estimator.

You’ll find the updated Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator in the AdWords interface over the next couple of weeks.

And despite what “they” are saying on the forums, Adwords is still a great place to advertise, especially if you’re not in the “online marketing” niche.

Paul