The Google AdWords blog has announced a new feature to help brand advertisers who use the AdWords content network. Although most AdWords campaigns are aimed at achieving a direct response from the advertising, brand advertisers tend to use display ad formats to raise awareness and purchase consideration for a product or service a person might buy at a later date (or often a combination of the two).

Google has now added a new feature which filters out "below the fold" inventory - that is, ads that might be served up onto a webpage, but are not actually seen by the user if they don't scroll down the page far enough to see the advert. This will enable brand advertisers to be more selective about where ads appear as the filter allows them to choose to show ads only in places that appear on the user's screen when the page loads, without requiring them to scroll down.

Google's blog says that with a host of different web browsers, monitor sizes, and screen resolutions, it's hard for advertisers to predict where an ad will land, since the same placement may appear differently on each user's screen. Therefore to simplify the process, Google has implemented a statistically driven solution to determine which ads are above and below the fold. This statistically driven model only considers ads "above the fold" if they are completely on-screen when the browser window loads.

This is an interesting development and one that should help brand advertisers monitor and control their advert performance and to get a better understanding of how well these work across different sites on the content network.