NEW: ‘Google Gears’ for AdWords

This week’s Best Search Strategies show will air on Wednesday, July 28^th at 2:00pm Pacific Time.  We will be going over a 13-point checklist of the things you need to know to obtain PPC success.

When it comes to maximizing your PPC effectiveness, 13 is a lucky number. Listen in as you’ll learn the 13 must-know PPC management tactics you need to employ to setup and run a profitable campaign.

The 13 point checklist will include:

• The most common mistake made when changing bids
• Why your ads in the content network should never be the same as the search network
• The 3 most effective ways to increasing your quality score

So tune onto Webmaster Radio this Wednesday to join in on some helpful tips for your own PPC success.

While navigating a client’s account today in Google I noticed a new feature listed in the top right hand side of the screen:

When you click this tiny icon a pop-up appears giving a brief explanation of what will happen if you install Google Gears.

So what exactly is Google Gears?  According to their website, you can expect the following from this new Google product:

• Let web applications interact naturally with your desktop
• Store data locally in a fully-searchable database
• Run JavaScript in the background to improve performance
• Let users access information offline or provide you with content based on your geographical location
• Designed to be used on both Google and non-Google sites:
  • (Google Sites) Google Reader, Google Docs, & windows mobile version of Picasa.
  • (Non-Google Sites) Zoho and Remember the Milk

Continue with the prompts within AdWords to bring you to the Google Gears installation screen:

Once you have installed the product and your web browsers has restarted, return to Google AdWords and click that link again in the upper right hand part of the screen.  Once that’s done, you should be prompted to activate Google Gears:

When finished, you should see the the original icon which you clicked to begin this journey go from a red-slashed circle to a green-full circle.

So far, I’ve been playing around, jumping from screen to screen, and I can honestly say that the interface of AdWords is, in fact, faster!

However, this account has only a few hundred keywords and a few dozen ads… what about our client who has over 300,000 keywords and several thousand ads?  If you noticed in the bullets above, AdWords was not listed.  After logging into all of our clients’ accounts, I found that only this single AdWords account had been selected–an obviously limited beta-test release.  It would be nice to test Gears on our more robust clients, as any work done on those accounts typically require longer load times for all that data to transfer to my screen.

Keep your eyes peeled on your accounts to see if you can take advantage of this new feature.

Has anyone else seen an a positive, negative, or flat effect from using Google Gears?