In November 2008, Google began to test a new interface for Adwords with a few U.S advertisers and has now expanded it’s availability to other countries, including the UK and Australia and also in other languages across the world.
This new interface adds another dimension to Adwords, making the process of altering bids, changing settings, seeing trends and comparing the performance of ads / keywords etc. that much easier, as it can now all be completed from the one screen.
New drop down menus have been introduced to the main tabs on the campaign management page. Most of the tabs were in fact present before, such as ‘Tools’ and ‘My Account’ etc, however ‘Billing’ has now been added, and the new drop downs make it easier to find and access the sub categories, such as ‘Billing Preferences’ and the ‘Keyword Tool’, rather than having to click through several pages to find it.
Additionally, graphs have been added to the main page, which allows users to compare a choice of different metrics over different time periods to make spotting trends and reviewing performance over time a lot simpler than with the previous interface.
The new tabs that have been added to the interface make comparisons across campaigns possible, as users can now see a list of all ad groups across all campaigns in one big list.
Similarily, by clicking on the ‘Keyword’ or ‘Ads’ tabs users can see the performance of all the keywords, and ads in comparison to one another across all campaigns.
This consequently makes it a lot easier to see which are the top performing keywords / ads across all the campaigns rather than dipping into each campaign and ad group or running a report.
Changing settings such as daily budgets and CPC bids are also made a lot easier in the new interface, as it is now possible to simply click on the bid or budget in the correct tab and edit it in the box that pops up.
Network management has also been made easier, with the introduction of a new network tab.
This allows users to see the performance of their ads across the networks, consequently making setting unique bids or excluding particular networks quick and easy, in order to enhance their performance and make the best ROI.
This new interface is still in the development stage and not all of the original Adwords applications are supported in the new version. So whilst the beta expansion is still occurring users are able to switch from the new and old interfaces so still have access to all the original features available.
Also, and more importantly, this new interface is not going to effect the performance of the ads themselves, this will still require close attention and management, but hopefully this process will be made easier by the new interface.
Overall, we have found the new interface to work pretty well and clearly draws on the Google Analytics interface, which is extremely good. Merging this with some of the features of the (very good) Adwords Editor desktop programme has clearly resulted in some positive changes for Adwords users.
