PPC Times

Google blocked or removed approximately 3.1 billion ads for violating policies and restricted an additional 6.4 billion ads.

Good news for Google advertisers! Adwords now allow you to add audience lists at campaign level. Save time and energy by applying audience lists at campaign level and manage bids at campaign level.

To make it easier for you to manage your audience lists at scale, you can now apply them at the campaign level.

https://adwords.googleblog.com/2016/12/save-time-by-applying-audience-lists-at.html

Quality Score is not used at auction time to determine Ad Rank.

New AdWords interface rolling out to more users

Google has confirmed the rollout of the new user interface to more AdWords users.

Google announced a sweeping change to the interface of AdWords, a product that hadn’t had a significant facelift in quite some time. Yesterday, a few AdWords users were surprised to see the new UI showing when they hopped into their accounts.

Google announced that "Smart Bidding" is now going to be powered by machine learning. Google said they are "excited to announce Smart Bidding, our new name for conversion-based automated bidding across AdWords and DoubleClick Search that reflects the powerful machine learning behind it."

Smart Bidding can factor in millions of signals to determine the optimal bid, and it continually refines models of your conversion performance at different bid levels to help you get more from your marketing budget.

Even when it encounters areas with lower conversion volume, Smart Bidding's learning capabilities quickly maximize the accuracy of your bidding models to improve how you optimize the long-tail. It evaluates patterns in your campaign structure, landing pages, ad text, product information, keyword phrases and many more to identify more relevant similarities across bidding items to effectively borrow learnings between them.

Google Adwords industry Benchmark - The average conversion rate in Adwords across all industries is 2.70% on the search and 0.89% on the display network.