July 30, 2003

Google has completely overhauled the user interface (UI) of its pay-per-click internet advertising service AdWords to make it more user friendly, as competition in the search market continues to heat up.

The upgrade, which is currently available in beta version and will replace the existing UI in a couple of weeks, is designed to make managing campaigns easier, with emphasis on ROI and more transparency.

It also includes a number of new features such as campaign loading, account-wide search functionality and the ability to create and download more detailed and personalised reports.

The focus on ease-of-use should make the service more attractive to the mass market, including the vast number of local businesses worldwide, enabling Google to further extend its reach into the fast growing and lucrative pay-per-click market, expected to reach $5bn by 2006. The move will boost Google's understood aim of becoming the worldwide web's equivalent of Yellow Pages.

The company is currently locked in a fierce battle with pay-per-performance rival Overture, which agreed to be acquired by Yahoo! for $1.6bn last week.

Earlier this week, Overture announced a major search deal with US newspaper publisher Knight Ridder to provide both paid search and algorithmic search results to its network of 32 websites for one year, bidding against Google to win the business.

In addition, the company said last week that it won a similar full search service deal, including paid listings and web search, with Canadian portal Sympatico, which was previously a Google customer. Overture has also reportedly won a deal to displace Google for paid listings on UK ISP Freeserve, though this has yet to be confirmed.

However, Google has won its fair share of major deals including Ask Jeeves in the US and UK, and AOL in the US, which it stole from Overture last year. The company has also picked up several major customers for its recently launched contextual advertising product AdSense, including Weather.com and Switchboard, which spawned a rival product from Overture called Content Match.

Source: Net Imperative

        

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