Google Adwords advertisers! If you don't know about this, you're only hurting yourself.

This is just a cool little trick I learned from one of my friends while chatting with them today. We were talking about a dating offer and he nonchalantly pasted a link to me and, despite how long I've been marketing, I had no idea this was a feature. I was happy to find out about it though.

So basically, you can go on Google and search for any keywords you have ads for, but in the URL you place this little bad boy:

http://www.google.com/search?q=dating&adtest=on

Yup, it's that easy. Google will say the following at the top of the page to indicate that you're viewing ads in test mode:

Warning: This page is a tool for AdWords advertisers to test their ads. For full Google functionality return to the Google homepage.

How awesome is that? On top of that, you can't click on any of the ads accidentally. This is especially great for people who have max bids above $1.00, but also good for anyone who just doesn't want to get charged for clicking on their ads.

The best part is that it doesn't run up your impressions, which directly affects your CTR (Click Through Ratio) as the formula is literally Impressions / Clicks. You want as little impressions-per-clicks as possible.

Anyway, I just thought I'd let you know. Hope it helps.

Scott

** Update 2/1/2008 **

Okay, so I found out there's an actual URL you can go to in order to perform this search and it's even more powerful than I thought. Just go over to-

http://adwords.google.com/select/AdTargetingPreviewTool

You can preview your ad from different contexts, like location, which google search engine, display language, etc. Very cool stuff.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 31st, 2008 at 3:39 pm and is filed under Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Strategy, Google AdWords, PPC Engines, Tools. 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.