Ok, you’ve probably noticed that too. Today, I logged in to my Adwords account and saw that next to every keyword in my adgroup, there’s a magnifier icon showing up. Turns out, it’s a diagnostic tool that tells if my ad is showing for a particular keyword or not.

See the edited screenshot below:

Yah, I didn’t want to disclose my keywords… Heck, I’m not even sure if I can make screenshots of this new diagnostic tool. So anyway…

When you press that little magnifier icon next to your keyword, you can see the following tab popping up:

It basically says that your ad is shown for that particular keyword. It also gives some info (as you can see above) about the location targeted and the language your campaign targets.

At first, it seemed like a great thing… But then, I started to think if this is really so useful. I mean, I know this info already when I set up my campaign. And about the ad showing… Couldn’t you just see if the keyword is active or inactive for search? Google could simply incorporate this diagnostic tool into the whole “active/inactive” for search thing.

Is It Really So Useful?

If my keyword is inactive, then I could look and see the reason why (not served enough, 4th or 5th page, CTR is below 0.5, etc.). I could see if my ad is showing for that keyword or not without even clicking on that icon…

So far, that’s what I think…

If you have your opinion about this, go ahead and submit a comment. Maybe I’m missing something here, I don’t know…

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 9th, 2006 at 8:30 am and is filed under PPC Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.