In late May, Google introduced a tool known as the Bid Simulator. Many of the leading Search Marketing blogs have been reviewing the tool today based on a reference guide that has been spreading around the industry.
What Does The Bid Simulator Do?
This bid simulator tool will review Google AdWords data from across the system over the past 7 days and then present a chart of estimated pay per click bid prices, the ensuing search result position, your total cost, and total impressions based on new bid prices. The tool will present data based on click prices from 2x to 0.5x your current bid price.
The tool, however, does have some limitations. It is currently available only to advertisers on the Google.com domain and within the search network only. The tool only appears in campaigns not restricted by Ad Scheduling and running 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. It is also not available to campaigns using the Conversion Optimizer, Budget Optimizer, and Position Preference tools.
Finally, the tool is not meant to be used for estimating click prices for new or non existent keywords, ad groups, and campaigns. A keyword in your campaign must have "adequate traffic" history in order for the tool to present relevant simulations of how increased bid prices will affect the given keyword. So we cannot simply insert a keyword into the account and tell a client, 'you must pay X in order to receive Y number of clicks in position Z or greater.'
Thankfully, according to the presentation, there are plans by Google to take some of these tools and settings into account as the Bid Simulator moves out of beta. This will allow more AdWords advertisers to use the tool to save time and effort in their AdWords campaigns and the budgets associated with them.
I hope to have more information as the beta becomes available to us, and to highlight some of the small things I've noticed that are both helpful and revealing when it comes to Google Adwords.
But for now this is all you get! :)
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It sounds like you can actually get a better read on how well your campaign is doing with this tool.
How it will affect your quality score remains to be seen.
Isaac
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This is a praiseworthy addition from Google, predicting number of impressions and position we can expect if we increase or decrease our bid is a great way to reinforce our adwords campaigns. Advertisers foreseeing click volumes and how high bids be placed so that it be positioned among the top ads lets them run productive campaigns for themselves or competitors.
By this our estimations and expectations will get more accurate.