Google AdWords announced two updates including new alerts and place pages in performance reports, let me explain both in more detail.

The new alerts are designed to help you stay on top of your campaigns. In addition to the billing alerts, they added alerts for new keyword and budget ideas in the Opportunities tab. Also, for those that use conversion tracking, you can now create custom alerts for changes in conversion volume, conversion rate, and cost per conversion. These two new alerts are not yet available for those who have My Client Center (MCC) accounts, but Google hopes to add them soon.

A little over a month ago, Google launched Place Pages for Google Maps. On those pages are contextual ads powered by Google’s content network. Advertisers can now see how well those ads are performing via the placement performance reports. Google added:

With this update, you can more closely monitor and optimize your clients’ campaigns. While placement targeting is not available for Google Maps, you can increase the likelihood of appearing on Place Pages by increasing bids on high-performing keywords or by creating ad groups with highly specific keywords to target Place Pages relevant to your clients’ products or businesses.

Related Topics: Google: AdSense | Google: AdWords | Google: Maps & Local | Google: Place Pages

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz