New Google AdWords Interface: All You Need to Know

Google likes saying it puts its AdWords customers and their businesses first. To this end, early this year, they announced the roll-out of a new AdWords experience, an update of last year’s earlier refresh.

It’s one of the biggest overhauls to the look of AdWords since its launch, and the search giant says the new interface will be available universally by the end of the year. It’s certainly more than a facelift!

Industry insiders admit the fresh layout can take some getting used to, but say the extra features should provide the incentive to persevere.

The improvements include less clutter and easier navigation, along with some new tools. And while campaigns run as before, you can switch back to the old AdWords if you prefer.

There’s no extra cost for the upgrade, currently available to selected advertisers only, and the benefits include being able to create and improve campaigns based on your own business goals, faster access to your most-used features, and helpful insights thanks to new graphs and high-quality reporting tools.

What’s changed?

New overview screen

This features links to different parts of your account and some widgets which highlight important data. Individual campaigns are still listed on the left-hand side, and you can filter by campaign type. The top graph in the Overview sections allows the comparison of a maximum of four metrics, showing you how clicks, conversions or costs have changed over time.

Promotion extensions

These let you show and link to a particular offer in text ads, and there’s a tag icon in this extension for easy identification.

Household income reporting and targeting in search

This is now accessible from the Demographics tab. You can also see easily how your campaigns perform along different income segments, and set bid adjustments at campaign or ad group level.

Audiences page

This new feature offers one place for managing audience targeting and optimisations. And audience targeting has some fresh terminology, with ‘Bid only’ now called ‘Observations’, and ‘Target and bid’ renamed ‘Targeting’.

N-grams

A Words tab in the Searches box shown on the campaign Overview provides an n-gram view of the words included in the search terms that have triggered ads in the campaign, which helps you analyse how words or phrases perform across a wide range of search queries.

Call bid adjustments

These can be used to get call extensions to show more or less frequently in mobile search campaigns, included in the Advanced Bid Adjustment section at campaign level.

You can also choose to bid a percentage higher or lower for specific types of interactions.

‘Biggest changes’ widget

This draws your attention to the campaigns which have increased or decreased most dramatically compared with the previous time period, allowing you to make precision spending decisions.

Geographic visualisation

In the Locations section, you can now see a big map immediately, showing you where you’re targeting adverts and where you’ve excluded them from showing up. This gives you an at-a-glance indication that you’re targeting the right region – you can share with clients too.

Meanwhile, future features that were in the pipeline back in the summer include enhanced landing page performance, custom in-market audiences, a new free attribution product and store sales measurement uploads.

We do have a few words of warning. Because daily budgets are now more flexible, you can end up spending more. On days with a lot of high quality traffic, you could spend up to twice your daily budget. (However, this spending may be balanced by days when you spend less than your daily budget.)

Equally, if you’re spending money on people visiting your website via mobile and it’s mobile unfriendly, you’re wasting your money since these customers are far less likely to convert. Google has a tool which can help you create a site which is great for mobile so more traffic is likely to convert. If you put a URL in the tool, you’ll see some useful stats – for example, most sites lose half their visitors while loading, which, if you’re paying for this, is clearly a waste of resources.

While we welcome anything that makes Google AdWords easier to use, we’re here to help you get the most from the tool. Talk to us about improving your AdWords experience today.