Have you visited the Opportunities Tab in your Google AdWords account recently?

Over the last few months, Google has been building a range of insights in the Opportunities Tab to help AdWords users optimize their Google advertising campaigns.

In the Opportunities Tab, AdWords users can find customized keyword and budget ideas to help refine the performance of campaigns.

Budget Ideas:
Your Opportunities tab shows budget ideas when a campaign is repeatedly meeting its daily budget. Such campaigns are limited by budget and therefore are missing out on potential traffic and clicks.

Each budget idea shows a recommended daily budget for that campaign as well as the predicted impact of using that budget. These are the same budget recommendations as you sometimes see in your campaign settings.

Keyword Ideas:
The keyword ideas on your Opportunities tab can help extend your advertising reach by targeting additional customers. You might gain additional impressions and clicks when you add relevant keywords to an ad group.

NEW: Keyword Bid Ideas

Well, now Google has added Bid Ideas into the Opportunities Tab. According to the release post:

“Bid ideas, based on bid simulator data, will help you raise or lower your bids on specific keywords to improve your AdWords ROI. Whether you wish to decrease overall costs or increase traffic to your website, customized bid ideas can help you determine exactly which bids to adjust to make the most of your advertising budget.

You’ll see bid ideas in your account if we determine there’s an opportunity for you to:

• receive significant additional clicks without a significant increase in cost
• save money without sacrificing a lot of clicks

When you view the Bid Ideas, you’ll see “their estimated cost, impression, and click impact. When you click on a bid idea, you’ll see a graph showing clicks versus cost for a range of bid amounts. The graph will include your keyword’s current bid (marked in gray) and the proposed bid (marked in yellow).”

The sceptics out there are always weary when the likes of Google offer advertising optimization advice. The primary concern is that their interests are in you spending more money.

This might be true – but they’re more interested in you being successful, so you keep spending money – so the Opportunities Tab is worth checking out.

My advice is that you should always consider Google’s recommendations in light of your own Google Adwords strategy.

Remember, Google can only see what the data tells it. So it’s not going to be aware of tests, special offers, or other factors that might be influencing your campaign decisions.

• Let us know what you think about Google’s newest Opportunity Insight…