Google AdWord’s Releases New UI: What’s Changing and What to Expect

Google AdWords is rolling out changes to its user interface, changes that include new branding, and even a new name, Google Ads, set to go into effect July 24th. Marketers also have access to exclusive new features and improved versions of current tools that will continuously be released. We have the breakdown of what the new interface has to offer and how it will impact marketers working in the Google AdWords platform.

What’s New?

• Demographic targeting: Marketers now have the capacity to target based on household income and parental status.

• Promotions extensions: Special sales or offers with your ads to eliminate the need for promotion headlines and rules; you can schedule a sales promo in as an extension.

• Ad variations: You can create and test different versions of your advertisement across campaigns or accounts. Even during your campaign run, you can continue to test the headlines, and replace keywords.
• Ad history: You can get historical access to all versions of your advertisement.
• Bid adjustments for calls: You can increase bids on campaigns that drive valuable calls. This is especially useful for businesses that find value in customers that call beforehand to get more information about the offered goods or services.
• Heatmaps: The reporting interface is more visual with day and hour heatmaps. AdWords automatically creates a visual representation of campaign performance by day and hour in the overview dashboard.

• Audience Manager: You can put all of your audience targeting lists in one place for a central hub to manage sources, lists, and insights into all your audience segments.

New and Improved Features:

• Recommendations: This is a tab with Google’s recommendations for campaign optimizations, in a format that can easily be implemented at any time. Many of the recommendations can be exported to an AdWords Editor-compatible Excel format to quickly upload changes to an account.

• Dashboard: In your dashboard, high-level views of various industry KPIs, and custom dashboards can be created from this. It is not recommended to make any data-driven decisions based on this data, but it is recommended to do a daily or weekly check-in.

Possible Cons:

• Display Planner: You can see reach and performance estimates while you are creating your display campaign, pre-launch. This is no longer available as a standalone tool.
• Aesthetic: The dashboard is more visually complex, there is not a lot of space to work with the larger dashboard, so it’s important that marketers specializing in AdWords work on a larger screen while in the platform. This can also be remedied by using the chart expansion button to allow more of your screen to be used to view data, hiding side navigation and headers.

• Learning Curve: There is a learning curve for marketers with lengthy experience in Google AdWords. You can switch back and forth between the old UI and new UI. While this might not sound like a detriment, it can be an impediment to a seasoned marketer to become accustomed to the new Google Ads.

Unsure about how to use these tools, and how these changes will affect your campaigns? Contact us at letstalk@katana.media and we’ll provide a free AdWords consultation!