There have been a few note-worthy updates to Google AdWords in the first week of 2011, so in case you’ve missed them – we’ve rounded up three things to be on the lookout for in your accounts.

1. Negative Keywords Lists

Previously, negative match keywords were associated to either the campaign or adgroup level. From there – if you had a list of keywords that you wanted in all your campaigns (say competitor keywords, keywords like “free” or “used”, etc.) you could use AdWords Editor to copy those keywords into all the campaigns you wanted. Now, within AdWords directly, you can maintain negative keyword lists and then associate these lists to all the campaigns you want.

To start building lists, select “Control Panel and Library” from the left-hand navigation (screen shot below) and then select “Negative Keyword Lists”. From here it is pretty straightforward to build your list and associate new campaigns with those negative keywords.

2. Keyword Ideas for Mobile Devices

Within Google’s existing keyword tool in AdWords, there is now an advanced option to review keywords based on the device used. You can now restrict your keyword research to the following categories:

• Desktop & Laptop Devices
• All Mobile Devices
• Mobile WAP Devices
• Mobile Devices with Full Internet Browsers

These new search options are super helpful for building out dedicated mobile campaigns (which you should be building if your site is at all mobile-friendly) as you can image search behavior differs greatly between someone sitting at a full computer compared to someone on a smartphone.

3. Display URL Changes

This is probably the least exciting for advertisers, but is still worth noting. Google is constantly tweaking the way their ads are displayed to get you, the advertiser more clicks (and them more money). So you may start noticing that the capitalization within your Display URLs is changing this week. Nothing needs to be done at the account level, all changes are being made by Google directly, but here is what will change:

The domain portion of your display URL will always be in all lowercase.

“For example, if your display URL is Subdomain.Example.com/Subdirectory, it will appear as subdomain.example.com/Subdirectory.”

The one thing I don’t like about this change is that I often use capitalization in a display URL if the client’s URL consists of multiple words. It helps to differentiate the words and searchers can likely read the full brand easier instead of seeing a run-on of all lowercase text. I recommend keeping an eye on click through rate if your ads fall into this category.

To read more in-depth on any of these topics, see the links below.

AdWords Negative Keyword Lists

Mobile Keyword Tool

Display URL Changes