From the Google Press Center - “Google AdWords Announces New Content Placement Reports for Advertisers“:

In an ongoing effort to provide more transparency to advertisers, Google announced today the availability of a new AdWords report, called a Placement Performance report, which enables advertisers to see the exact sites on the Google content network where their ads appear. Placement Performance reports also provide site-by-site performance metrics – including domain, URL, impression, click, conversion and cost data – as well as aggregated metrics for traffic generated from AdSense for domain sites.

We briefly mentioned this report back in April when it was being tested (and even earlier in February when it was still in the works).

Google hopes the new report will satiate advertiser demands for a more transparent AdWords system. Using the new report will let advertisers identify high-converting sites for possible targeting. On the converse, low-converting sites can also be filtered out.

So what does this all mean? Well… it depends on which side of the fence you’re sitting.

Advertisers

• Optimize your ad placement by filtering out low-converting sites
• Better targeting information for high-converting sites
• Better tracking of ROI
• Ad optimization information (better targeting for low-converting sites that you’d like to be high-converting sites)

Publishers (AdSense users)

• If you’re a poor converter… expect to be filtered out
• MFA sites will most likely see their AdSense earnings drop as more advertisers filter them out

I’m glad to see this rolled out to all AdWords accounts. I think it encourages everyone to step up their game. It should also help weed out the MFA sites and make websites with real, beneficial content more worthwhile to advertisers.

For screenshots of the new report, check out Marketing Pilgrim.