A key component of developing a search ads strategy is understanding what other advertisers are doing, and using this intelligence to optimize campaigns for top performance. To empower advertisers to make better informed optimization decisions, Google are launching the Auction insights report.

Google already provide Impression share columns within campaign and ad group reports that show the percentage of impressions received, compared to the estimated number of impressions for which they were eligible. While this report gives valuable insight into missed opportunities in aggregate, it also raises additional questions -- who competes in the same auctions, and can performance data be made available at a more detailed level?

When Google first created custom alerts, they wanted to provide advertisers with a way to be notified when certain behaviours or changes occurred in their AdWords account. Over time, they observed that most advertisers wanted to take action when such triggers occurred within their accounts. Many of these actions can now be done by creating automated rules - a tool within AdWords that enables you to schedule automatic changes to specific parts of your account based on the criteria that you specify.

Based on automated rules adoption, Google have decided to sunset custom alerts. Starting June 15, they will disable creation of new alerts and by the end of June, they will stop triggering existing alerts. This means that on June 30, you will not see custom alerts in your AdWords account. If you selected email as your notification method, this means you will no longer receive alert emails.

Google are actively working to bring an email-only option in automated rules so you can be notified when a rule requirements are met without taking any action. In the meantime, contact your Red Wasp account manager for some of the common ways you can use automated rules to save you time in managing your account.

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When Google launched bid simulator in 2009, they wanted to make it easy for us to understand the impact of bids on our advertising results. Until now, we’ve been able to access bid simulator at the keyword and ad group level.

To allow us to more easily simulate and apply bid changes at scale, Google have announced the launch of campaign bid simulator.

Google have been listening closely to the suggestions put forward by adwords users on how to reduce the guesswork involved with building new campaigns. To help improve the campaign building process, they’re rolling out improvements to the Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimator.

Improvements to the Keyword Tool

• See keyword ideas grouped by themes: With the updated Keyword Tool, you can easily view suggestions for new ad group themes and quickly choose to add ad groups directly to your account.

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Last week Google officially launched Adwords Express (formerly known as Google Boost) in the UK and Germany. Adwords express is a simple version of Adwords aimed at small business owners that want to advertise on-line but don't have the budget to employ a pay-per-click manager.

We've put Adwords Express through its paces and here it what we found....