Cheezman notes that Googlebase now support automatic adwords campaign creation.

If you post a listing on Google Base, Google will semi-automatically create adwords campaigns that point at your  Googlebase posting.

I say “semi-automatically” because while Google automatically chooses the keywords, it’s still up to you to create the ad copy for the campaign, a difficult but important task.  Ad copy can specified either for individual ads or all ads belong to the same category.

Automated AdWords could help Google Base achieve more traction and increase the number of adwords advertisements. 

The big questions are:

(1) How well does their automatic keyword selection work relative to manual keyword selection?  Keywords selection and tuning is a hard problem especially for verticals like jobs.

(2) To get the benefits of the automatic adwords creation, companies have to direct job prospects to the Google Base landing page experience, which is lacking in areas like company branding and usability. It’s clear that this benefits Google by increasing traffic to Google Base, but it’s not clear this is actually in companies best interest.  Wouldn’t both companies and Google be better served by having Google crawl the landing page of the company’s choice, in which the essential facts are embedded as structured metadata?

Up to this point, Google Base is running far behind competitors like Craigslist in terms of establishing a free classifieds community.  Automated AdWords will leverage Google’s strengths in technology and scale. (Community has never been Google’s strong point– they had to buy their way into YouTube, for instance, rather than creating their own community on Google Video.)

I’d be very interested in sharing experiences with anyone who has tried the automated AdWords functionality.