Somehow, I just recently re-discovered Google’s Adwords Ads Diagnostic Tool. Turns out it’s really powerful tool. One thing that I loved the most is that you don’t have to search for proxy server list in case you want to see ads from another country.

For example, you live in Florida, right. Now you advertise some intimate clothing for women in the United Kingdom. If you type in your search term into Google, your ad won’t show. It’s because your browser is set to .com. You could of course put .co.uk at the end and access your ad this way. However, if you need to search not only by location, but by language too (which is set in your browser), you’d be in trouble.

If you sell something to Indian residents, you obviously want to target Indian language and Indian location only. So in order to see the ads, you’d need to change the browser’s language (not sure how to do that and type: www.google.in. If you have more geo-targeted campaigns, that would be a daunting task.

Adwords Ads Diagnostic Tool has a “Preview” link, where you can see your keyword that’s targeted for one or another location.

So if you had a keyword “Sony Digital Camera”, you could preview it and see the other ads competing for the key term. If your location was UK, you could see your ads, just like a visitor from UK.

When you click that link, you’re taken to the page where you may type in various keywords and see if your ads are showing, compare them to competitor’s ads and see what you need to do in order to improve your ad.

I’m not sure, but I think that this preview search page doesn’t count impressions. If you keep searching for your ad in a normal way, impressions count. So the more you refresh the browser and the more keywords you search, the more imps you have and your CTR will go slightly down. So if you’re worried about your CTR, this tool is great.

Again, I’m not sure if it counts impressions or not, I believe not, because the page seems like a preview page and I don’t think that it actually counts any imps…

You can click on a magnifying glass next to any keyword and preview your ad by that particular keyword. If you have many adgroups, you’d just need to visit an adgroup and click a magnifying glass to preview your ads. It’s really powerful. So far, I’ve been using some proxy servers to check how my ads look in other languages or locations. From now on, I’m gonna use this one…

By the way, you can preview ads right now (without logging into account) by clicking a link below.

http://www.google.com/search?adtest=on&hl=en&lr=&q=Keyword

If you want to change the location, rename google.com into google.co.uk for example. But leave the whole search URL string intact, because it’s important.

You can use this option to view other ads so you wouldn’t have to generate unnecessary impressions and lower someone’s CTR…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 15th, 2006 at 4:50 pm 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.