1. Maintain or Decrease Cost – Identify ideas that might help you maintain or decrease your current spend.

3. Balance Cost and Traffic – Review a mix of ideas that are aimed at either increasing traffic or decreasing costs.

It has been a pretty busy month for the AdWords crew, it seems. The company recently added the ” Analyze Competition ” feature to the opportunities tab. They also launched a new click-to-call from Apps format, announced the Google Display Network, some changes to reporting, and the availability of sitelinks in all AdWords campaigns.

Google says advertisers who have used the format in the past have experienced big gains, and have boosted clickthrough rates by over 30% (on average).

“When a user’s query matches a keyword in your Ad Sitelinks-enabled seo campaign, Google will automatically determine if your ad qualifies to show Ad Sitelinks and whether to show the two-line or the one-line format based on the quality of that ad,” says Dan Friedman of Google’s Inside AdWords Crew. “Ads that currently qualify for the two-line format will not be affected by the addition of the new one-line format.”

“You should keep in mind that Ad Sitelinks is a campaign-level extension, so the links you create should be relevant to any ad in that campaign,” Friedman adds.

Advertisers can set up ad sitelinks for their campaigns by finding the option in the Campaign Settings tab in their AdWords accounts. It’s listed as “Show additional links to my site” in the “Ad Extensions” section.

“In the past, the most common way to measure how changes to your account affected your campaign performance was to measure how the campaign performed before and after you implemented your changes,” says product marketing manager Courtney Lischke. “However, this type of analysis can often be complicated by events that occur during the test period, including holidays, weekends, or changes to end user or advertiser behavior.”

“ACE allows you to perform faster, more accurate tests by executing your experimental campaign alongside your original campaign,” says Lischke. “By performing this type of simultaneous split test, we can tell you precisely if your campaign changes produce statistically significant results.”

Advertisers using ACE can measure things like the incremental impact of adding new keywords to their campaigns or changing keyword and ad group-level bids, the value of restructuring content campaigns to use more tightly themed ad groups, seo, the change in volume by using different keywords match types, etc.

Google has decided that instead of showing completely irrelevant ads in such cases, it will just dig back into another conversation from your Gmail usage, and show you ads related to that. This is illustrated in the clip below.

“Let’s say you’re looking at a confirmation email from a hotel in Chicago. Next to your email, you might see ads about flights to Chicago,” explains Gmail Product Manager Steve Crossan. “But sometimes, there aren’t any good ads to match to a particular message. From now on, you’ll sometimes see ads matched to another recent email instead. For example, let’s say you’re looking at a message from a friend wishing you a happy birthday. If there aren’t any good ads for birthdays, you might see the Chicago flight ads related to your last email instead.”

Google is careful to point out that it doesn’t store any extra information to show these ads. It just picks a different recent email to match. It’s all automated, and no humans are involved in picking the ads. The process is compared to Gmail’s spellchecker. Google also notes that no email or personal information is shared with advertisers.

The change will be rolling out over the next several days, so if you are still seeing ads completely irrelevant to any conversation you’ve had, you may not have the new system implemented yet.