One thing I’ve always loved about Google is their support team. My questions aren’t always satisfied, and I don’t necessarily always get my way, but at the very least they listen. For a while now I’ve been sending them my feature requests and I always receive a personal response from a real person who actually read my suggestion and forwarded it on. As a user, this encourages me. As an advertiser, it comforts me.
 
I have yet to see any of my ideas come to fruition in the Adwords platform, but I’ve only been submitting them for less than a year. I thought I might post them up here (and hopefully get some readers) so that those who agree can also forward these requests to Google. If enough of us suggest this, perhaps they’ll implement some of them! So here’s my list of improvements to Google Adwords. All other platforms who might be listening (I’m looking at you, Yahoo!) can feel free to implement these items first and try to steal away my business. :)

Note: Keywords have been changed to be generic examples.

Expanded Phrase Match

For some time now, I’ve been wishing for a match type somewhere between broad and phrase match. I’m not sure how helpful this would be, but when I create a campaign that has a bunch of broad match keywords with three, four, or more words in them, I would like to be able to specify how many of those words would trigger the ad.
 
So a keyword like “Canon Powershot A400″ which is in a group of keywords all for Powershots, I would like to specify that the keywords are broad, but have to contain “Powershot” in order to trigger the ad.
That way if Adwords for some reason decides the quality score on these ads is higher than my “Canon” broad match terms, someone searching for “Canon Cameras” would still receive the general ad, not the targeted ad.

Quick Bidder

On certain days of the year, I notice conversion rates drop considerably across the board. On other days, I enjoy a drastically increased conversion rate. On days like the latter, I tend to spend the first ten minutes of the day adjusting bids to take advantage (or cut the losses) of that day’s dynamics. However, I am forced to use the Google Adwords dayparting tool to do this since I have such a large keyword base.
 
What would be great is if there was a way to adjust bid percentages by campaign or even account. That way on Christmas day, a day when I typically see poor conversion rates, I can bid down to 20% or 30% of our normal bids while on days like today or tomorrow, days when I typically see better conversions, increase my bids to 120% or 130%.

You could even make it a cool and pretty GUI with an ajaxy slider or some such.

Ad Group History

What about a history tab in each ad group (and possibly each campaign) that would keep a log of all changes (creation date, bid changes, URL changes, keyword pause/delete, etc.) for that specific ad group. It would help a great deal in keeping track of changes and such and would improve greatly upon the current “My History” option in the tools section.
 

Ad Scheduling By Location

I was looking at some reports and realized that we convert visitors from certain time zones or states better at certain times of the day than others. What about a feature similar to ad scheduling, where I would schedule bid increases/decreases based on time of day AND location? It would be one more way to help target the right people (the ones who are looking to buy).
 

“My History” tool and Reverting

Currently, the “My History” tool downloads into a .csv format. While this is normally fine (and works fine for all the regular reports), it more or less breaks with the history report. This is because individual keywords have their match type shown with the appropriate symbol (i.e. brackets, quotes, or nothing) instead of having a separate column with a text entry (i.e. exact, phrase, or broad). Because this file type uses quotes to surround each field, Excel cannot import this file correctly if there are phrase match keywords within it. So I’d like to suggest that the same reporting protocol used in the reporting module be used in the change history tool to avoid this.
 
Secondly, having all the keywords in the same row as the ad group works okay for looking at the interface on the website, but it also interferes with downloading the file and using it in Excel. In my opinion, it’d be better to have each change as its own row, with the respective campaign and ad group listed.
 
As sort of an aside, another useful feature would be a “Revert to Date” feature where I could change all bids back to the way they were at a certain point in time.

Conversion Assist Tracking

Frequently, I believe that I have high volume but low converting keywords that act as loss-leaders into the site. For instance, a searcher might enter “science fiction books” and click on an ad, determine what book they want and then later search for something like “Dune Series”. Since they clicked through my first ad and liked my site, they might click on this second search as well, recognizing my website name. If they then order, Adwords registers the conversion to the second, more specific keyword since it was more recent. I’m unable to see that they clicked through a general keyword first.
 
I, like many advertisers out there base my bidding decisions on the ROI… and if I can’t see that an expensive keyword is generating revenue, then I’m likely to bid it down. However, if there was evidence to suggest that some keywords act as entry points and helping other keywords to convert, then I would be more likely to maintain these bids or even raise them. This change not only makes sense for advertisers, but also for Google since it prevents advertisers from lowering bids.

Timeline Reporting

How about reporting that didn’t just show metric trends over time, but also showed when big changes occurred during those trends. For instance, if I was looking at how the transaction rate has fluctuated over 6 months, the report would have little icons for when many bidding changes occurred or when new landing pages were set up. Talk about helpful data. Basically, this is simply combining the reporting with the history tool and would look something like Google Trends.

Labels

One thing I like to do is separate well performing keywords into a separate campaign. However, it makes more sense to leave them in their current topical structure. I’d love for the functionality that is in gmail to be added somehow to Adwords. So I could leave all my high performing keywords in their proper campaigns and ad groups, but label them “high performing” or “high cost/low conversion” and so on. It would allow easier reporting while still keeping a logical structure.