So here we go again. A full new release of our favorite Google PPC editing software, Google Adwords Editor, was released covertly in the middle of the night. So let’s see what’s new and we’ll also go over what we think is still missing!

New features available:

First page bid estimates: First page bid estimates for all the keywords in the campaign. There is no longer “Minimum cost-per-click” (CPC) bids. Yay!

Keyword Quality Score: A new tab for the quality score of every keyword in the account. About time this feature graced us. We don’t have to go back and forth with the web version to find out what where we went wrong.

New feature for Keyword Opportunities: Tailor your keywords according to location and language. With all the international clients we have, we’d been begging our local Google representative for this for a long time. This is a big deal for us.

The ‘Volume’ column on the Keyword expansion tab of the Keyword Opportunities tool is now showing absolute numbers (traffic for the last month) instead of scaled values.

Campaign targeting in the data view: You can see the location and language settings on the data view. These columns are hidden by default, but you can select them with the column chooser on the campaigns tab.

What I think is still missing?

• Changing the delivery method: when setting up a campaign I still miss the ability to determine if the delivery method will be standard or accelerated.
• Device platform: show the campaign on desktop or laptop computers or on mobile phones (or both).
• Ad serving: optimize or rotate ad texts.

This is a great step forward from Google. I’m not sure if it’s a full version upgrade, but I’ll take it. The location and language options are a huge plus. This is a better morning for the PPC team here.  Way to go Google.

You can read the official Google Release for Adword Editor 7.0 here.

The big difference between 2005 and 2008 is that we are now (the Adwords users/sharks) ready and welcome this change with wide open hands.

Why? We’ve learned what Adwords wants and look for it as well as build our new accounts by their requirements – Relevant and targeted campaigns from the ad to the landing page with, on one hand, friendly code and, on the other, a strong business model.

This all brings us to this latest change in the Adwords Quality Score. I can honestly say Google has listened and blessed us.

So what’s this change about?

We were, until just a little while ago, in an era where the Quality Score was 3 years old and not efficient enough for the level of professionalism and sophistication and work that people are presently doing in Adwords (that’s not to say everyone out there has a high level). From now on, the Quality Score will be calculate in real time, per the source of traffic – search networks – for each ad that’s being triggered taking into consideration its real-time keyword history performance. On the basis of that calculation, Adwords will then determine how much needs to be paid to get on to the first page results – Yay – no more “inactive keywords” : )

So now we can enjoy better targeting of our good ads and a higher cost for our bad ads which means it will make the competition more stringent and accurate. Oh, let’s also not forget that this will also make Google a whole lot more money.