» Google Gives The Power Back To The People? Nic n Cher: Views and news on SEM, SEO & Social Media

Today Google announced significant enhancements to the Google AdWords program. Finally, the answer to some of my Google prayers?! Maybe not. In short, in a couple of weeks, site-targeting will be offered to Google AdWord users as an opt-in to the content target matching.

Using the same AdWords interface, an advertiser will now be able to choose what sites their ads show on. These are chosen either by directly entering the url of the participating partner page, or by doing a keyword search for pages relating to your ads.

Payment will be on a cost per impression basis instead of a cost per click basis. It will be very interesting to see how smaller business’ respond to this decision. As it is common that big business’ prefer CPM because they can easily afford it. In addition, Google has placed a minimum of $2.00 per 1000 impressions to ensure that advertisers choose their ads and their audiences with care.

The site-targeted ads can be traditional text ads, static image ads or new image ads. The image ads will come in five new ad formats including banner, leaderboard, inline rectangle, skyscraper, and wide skyscraper.

On the whole, I think advertisers will be pleased with this new addition to AdWords, especially those interested in branding and those who live to TEST! Yes, as Andrew Goodman writes, there will now be no reason to have to guess how your campaign is performing. With this new opt-in users will be able to test and measure what sites are profitable and which are not. On the flip side, will site research and implementation be too complex, too technical, or too time consuming for the average AdWords user?

Nic ‘N’ Cher do not think it will be the answer to their content match prayers as much as it will be to advertising agencies, i.e. those advertisers that are branding oriented. However, there is nothing wrong with more control and at least we know Google is listening……

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