3 Things I Love About the New AdWords Interface
Google has allowed us to use its new interface for a long enough period of time for me to begin forming opinions about it. I’ve listed below three of my favorite updates that are included in the new AdWords interface.
Better Access to Your Content Network Sites
The new interface has streamlined the site exclusion process for us! Not only that, but we can view the performance of all of the site we hand pick (via placements) as well as all of the automatic placements that are paired to us through the content network. This easily gives us the ability to view the success of different sites and different placement strategies, and we can get a better feel for what each campaign or ad group is doing on the content network without having to run multiple reports.
We can also easily edit placements, manage bids, exclude them, or export them. The previous interface did not allow such a streamlined and simplified way to interact with all of your content sites. We also have the ability to see how sites perform, so we can make quicker decisions to pause, modify, or add different advertisement types to certain sites. For instance in the group above the checked off campaigns are not performing nearly as well as the other campaigns. With one click and one page view we can easily weed out poorly performing sites from our content campaign. This is a huge benefit of the new interface.
A More Powerful Search Query Report
We can now see what search phrases are triggering our ads!
This may show us that we need to refine negative keywords, add new keywords or themes, or abandon certain ideas altogether. If we wanted access to this information in the old interface we would have to run several reports, and sift through many many lines of data. The new interface has streamlined this process and broke up the data by ad group. This means we can dig in to each campaign and see how we can best manage our impression share. Secondly, like in the above example, we may not want to drive searchers looking for a phrase like “search engine marketing” to this ad and landing page, so we can quickly and easily add it as a negative keyword.
Graphs – Everywhere!
I am using the ads tab as an example of one of the more useful graphs that has been added into the interface. (The Ads tab has been changed too – its much easier to test different TYPES of ads and modify your ads – but I’m getting off topic here.) Here we can see how clickthrough rate has changed throughout the designated period of time.
This may not seem like a huge change, but prior to this we’d have to use many many mouse clicks to see how CTR was affected over multiple periods of time, and ultimately we’d have to run reports so we could refer to and update the data accordingly. And more than that, here is just one of the many places Google’s new interface has added a graphical representation of the data.
In Summary
I’ve showcased three changes that really streamline the process of managing your pay per click account with AdWords. The unspoken commitment of the new interface is something along the lines of – more graphics, more data, less clicks – and as an account manager I absolutely appreciate this sentiment, and I think the streamlined nature of the new interface, as well as the visual representation of data are two steps in a very good direction.
However it is not perfect, and some nuances of the old interface that were really important got reduced or removed, so stay tuned for my next post where I talk about some of the changes that I do not like.
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