Google has recently made a number of changes in AdWords to provide advertisers with estimates about the impact of bid level changes. Previously this included the ability to see the estimated number of impressions with the highest bid level, and a new blog post reports on another change whereby advertisers can view bid simulations across all keywords in an ad group at once.

This new adgroup level bid simulator provides simulations for two types of changes - applying a single bid to all the keywords in the ad group, and updating the adgroup default bid. Google says that, for some advertisers who manage bids at the keyword-level, they could achieve similar or better results by managing bids by using a single adgroup default Max CPC bid.

Google provides some examples of ways to use the bid simulator in the blog post and the intention of this tool is for advertisers to see ways of making bidding decisions across keywords in aggregate. They suggest checking the adgroup level simulations to find out if using a single bid for all the keywords in the adgroup could save time and money. In addition, low traffic keywords could be managed in aggregate by using the adgroup default bid for them by deleting their keyword level bids.