Google announced yesterday an update to the search based keyword tool within AdWords.

1. New Filters

Now you can add filters to customize which keywords Google gives you search volume estimates on.  Some of the filters allow you to set a minimum monthly search amount, low, medium or high competition, ad share, search share, suggested bid, and URL containing specific keywords.

The monthly searches filter allows you to enter a maximum or minimum number for search volume average for a month.

Competition Filter allows you to set the degree to which a keyword will have competition in placement for in the Google SERPS. You can set this to low, medium or high.

Ad share means you can set a maximum or minimum percentage for which an ad for your site appeared for the given keyword.

While Search share represents a maximum or minimum percentage for which your site appeared in the first page of search results for the query.  The ad share and search share filters help you customize your results to focus on queries where you’re not showing up in the natural search-results.

Suggested Bid filter allows you to set a range bid amount that may place your ad in the top three positions of the Google SERPS

And finally, the URL contains filter allows you to find the best page on your website that matches your keyword.

filters

2. Country, Language and Currency Settings

After you set any filters, you can set up the keyword tool to only give you search volume estimates on specific countries and languages. The default will show results from every country.  However you can switch to get information from almost any country, language and currency you wish.  This is great to determine if you should begin a geo-targeted PPC campaign to target specific countries.

language

I think these new additions are nice and will come in use at some point while managing my PPC campaigns, but definitely not for each account I have.  Google makes improvements to their tools based of advertiser comments, so the more you comment the more likely an addition you recommend will make the cut!