AdWords History Timeline Published
Jason Lock
Posted 31 January, 2017 by Jason Lock in PPC
AdWords History Timeline Published
For those of us who have been in paid search since before AdWords was on the scene, it’s easy to forget the details about when certain “features” were released, and in what form they first appeared.
For those who are newer to the industry, it’s probably hard to imagine the AdWords ecosystem without the display (content) network, or a concept of Quality Score, or even optimising accounts before Google Analytics was around.
Pretty much every feature we know and use today which we class as “fundamental” was a new feature at some point in the past, and now you can find out when! It’s easy to filter the timeline by selecting the tags such as “Quality Score” or you can scroll to a particular year of interest.
Most agencies keep a resource of key events and inspired by the Google algorithm change history by moz for SEO, we decided to make ours available – as it’s not always easy to put a date to these changes, or even how to phrase what you’re looking for!
We have more to add to the resource, and we’ll be keeping it up to date so we hope it’s of use to some of you. If you have any ideas on anything you’d like to see, additional categories you’d like to filter for or events that are missing, be sure to let us know.
View the timeline here
Thanks! That’s very usefull and interesting. I didn’t know that at first ads appear on the right-hand side only. Now we can see the direction of changes in AdWords more clearly :)
Hi, thanks for your comment.
Yes, it’s amazing how they’ve done a complete turn-around on that. It started off just 3 ads on the right-hand side paid for on a CPM basis. Then above and to the right, then above and below and to the right, and then finally just above and below. Now they’re testing 4 ads below the natural results as well!
Great read, it’s hard to believe AdWords has been around for 17 years! It’s always interesting to see how marketing platforms have evolved over time to cater for changing consumer behaviour in the online space, as well as technological advances. I’m excited to see how Google will integrate AdWords with the rapidly rising voice-recognition technology over the coming months.
Hi Brenda, That’s a really interesting point, and probably something Bing will have to try and get to grips with before Google, with the rise of Amazon’s Alexa and Siri. 10 keyword search terms just might not be enough anymore! Will they bring out a new match type to try and join sentence structures together? Will combinations of search terms be considered in ad rank? Context is king!
“Gmail ads launch for all advertisers” in 2015… hm.. I see that I missed something interesting ;)
Hi Dev, yes it’s still pretty hidden in the current UI in my opinion. When the new interface rolls out universally I suspect it will be much more obvious!
Interesting how the ads kept growing bigger and bigger pushing down organic listings. Extensions were becoming more and more important. I guess organic listings are Google’s biggest competitor in the advertising space :) I am curious to see how much further organic will keep being pushed down… and the creative ways Google will come up with to push the competition out while still keeping their word of never remove organic listings
Interesting! Thank you …It’s worth reading.
God read 17 years with AdWords!
It would be very interesting if You could provide a view, how AdWords panel looked like at a time of each release ;) Do you think it is even doable?
Thanks. Very good reading :)
17 Years of Adwords ! Really !
its really interesting and you provided us with a vast overview of adwords panel !
cheers !
Great article! And man… wow, 17 years… Im in shook :)
Awesome article. Thanks!