The Inside AdWords blog announced that they have improved the Google AdWords Preview Tool.
Google launched the preview tool in September 2006. Back then, you had to manually add location attributes and values to the URL of the preview tool to see ads within that location. Now Google is offering several different drop down menus to aid you in previewing your ad in the location you desire.
In addition, if you want to forward the results of the ad preview tool to a client or someone else, you can no longer simple copy the URL at the top.
Google should probably add a “link to this page” feature, like they have on Google Maps. But if you want to send people that URL, you can still do so. In Firefox, select the criteria of the ad preview. Then right click in the bottom frame and select “This Frame” and then “Open Frame in New Tab” and there you can copy the URL to that specific page.
By the way, See Google Results From Any Country With Firefox Extension covers a tool that does some of what the preview tool does, directly from within Firefox.
Related Topics: Google: AdWords
This sounds good, it should help keeps clients off the back of busy SEMs – although without a “link to this preview” feature, I can imagine a lot of screenshots being taken!
It’s great that the ad preview tool has been improved. Although it’s been available since Sept 2006, the number of google advertisers searching on their own keywords to find out their position was probably still very high – unfortunately this will have been inflating their impression data and possibly having a negative effect on their CTR.
Now that Google have altered the algorithm to return more relevant results to each individual, google advertisers are sure to be using the ad preview tool more often to get an idea of their average position.