Google AdWords Interface Updates

“Google’s advertising system, AdWords, is being updated and completely redesigned,” stated Samantha Lemonnier, AdWords’ Director of Engineering, at the annual Google summit last week. The user interface (UI) that hosts all of the back end campaign nuts and bolts will be redesigned with intuitive and easy-to-use features.

As shown in this screen shot, the new UI illustrates performance in a dashboard view broken out by campaigns and devices. The new dashboard view includes other insightful data too, such as time of day and location.

Currently, an advertiser can segment the data in the interface, but it’s not that pretty or easy to get to. Many times data is collected in separate reports that get merged into cumbersome Excel sheets by analysts and managers. Marketers use the data gathered from AdWords to try to understand what is working, what is not, and to make optimizations appropriately. Of course, marketers also have to understand the impact of levers, measuring, and testing—but that’s for another POV.

Setting up campaigns has become more intuitive since the process for selecting settings has become less granular and now uses a more wizard-like approach. The new system’s campaign creation flow allows a user to identify the KPIs or goals of the campaign and then identifies settings to help meet them.

The launch will take place between Q3 2016-2017, with a feedback loop for early adopters, selected by Google.

What This Means for Advertisers

That depends on who you are. Advertisers will rejoice in this new interface for multiple reasons, including time savings and ease of segmenting data for actionable insights. By making AdWords a more intuitive interface and less complex, Google is ultimately positioning itself for increased opt-in.

The impact of these changes, however, will mostly affect small to mid-size advertisers or agencies. Larger and more advanced search agencies will be less impacted since they tend to spend less time in AdWords and instead leverage Bid Management Platforms (BMP) in conjunction with in-house technology and proprietary tools in order to view data and make decisions across multiple platforms and channels at scale.

Final Thoughts

Google is applying full force to ensure a mobile-first approach by updating text ads for consistency across devices (i.e., removal of right hand rail, expanded text ads) and making data/insights/trends more visible, as well as digestible, in the interface and others. While this is only one of many features made public last week by Google, it’s refreshing to know they are making these changes from both a consumer and marketer perspective.