AdWords History Timeline Published

Jason Lock

Posted 31 January, 2017 by 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

Having spent more than 15 years within the digital agency environment, latterly heading up the PPC department, Jason brings a wealth of experience to Screaming Frog.

14 Comments

  • Widoczni 7 years ago

    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 :)

    Reply
    • Jason Lock 7 years ago

      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!

      Reply
  • Brenda 7 years ago

    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.

    Reply
    • Jason Lock 7 years ago

      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!

      Reply
  • Dev 7 years ago

    “Gmail ads launch for all advertisers” in 2015… hm.. I see that I missed something interesting ;)

    Reply
    • Jason Lock 7 years ago

      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!

      Reply
  • Natasha Popovich 7 years ago

    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

    Reply
  • Suanlian Tangpua 7 years ago

    Interesting! Thank you …It’s worth reading.

    Reply
  • Frederik 7 years ago

    God read 17 years with AdWords!

    Reply
  • Sebastian 7 years ago

    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?

    Reply
  • Mark 7 years ago

    Thanks. Very good reading :)

    Reply
  • Mughal 6 years ago

    17 Years of Adwords ! Really !
    its really interesting and you provided us with a vast overview of adwords panel !
    cheers !

    Reply
  • Thomas 6 years ago

    Great article! And man… wow, 17 years… Im in shook :)

    Reply
  • Mark 5 years ago

    Awesome article. Thanks!

    Reply

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