I don't believe I have seen any announcement around the fact that Google has released version 7.0 of the AdWords Editor, but they have.
The release notes document many of the changes, including:
- First page bid estimates: AdWords Editor now uses first page bid estimates for your keywords. Minimum cost-per-click (CPC) bids are no longer used.
- Keyword Quality Score: The Keywords tab now displays the Quality Score for your keywords.
- Keyword Opportunities locale: Tailor your keyword suggestions to a particular language and location by changing your Keyword Opportunities locale.
- Campaign targeting in the data view: You can view your targeting settings in the new 'Language' and 'Location' columns on the Campaigns tab. These columns are hidden by default, but you can select them with the column chooser.
- Send feedback to Google: Help us improve AdWords Editor by enabling usage tracking in your AdWords Editor settings (Tools menu > Settings).
- The 'Volume' column on the Keyword expansion tab of the Keyword Opportunities tool now shows absolute numbers (traffic for the last month) instead of scaled values.
- The Keyword Opportunities tool isn't available for draft accounts.
Why so hush hush about the 7.0 release? Well, possibly because the 6.5 AdWords editor was plagued with issues that didn't get resolved until two weeks later. So maybe a quiet release will get early adopters to update, submit bugs and give Google a better chance at fixing 7.0 before more people download it. Or maybe they will announce the update today and I am wrong.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Update: There is a bug with the automated backup feature, so beware.
