With the multitude of the features released recently for the new AdWords interface, we thought it would be useful to review some of its functionalities compared to the old one and recap the novelties.
The ‘Overview’ tab
The new AdWords is set to ease the visualisation of data, and the ‘Overview’ tab is the biggest change from a visualisation point of view. This was nothing special before, just an amalgam of tables showing our data filtered, but now it’s actually enjoyable to look at.
We have had clients whose branded traffic was affected by unexpected events, like the launch of a new TV show with a similar name. The n-gram search term visualisation proved its value, allowing us to stop irrelevant traffic as soon as it started piling up.
This tab is a great helper for reporting, showing account-wide trends for devices and time of day, biggest changes (compared to previous period), and other factors.
The new interface wins this time: 1-0
Navigating through tabs
The situation is different when it comes to navigating through tabs. The customer relevant columns chosen are not carried through, making the daily account deep dive more time-consuming.
To help combat this, you can set views with the information needed at every level of an account, though it’s still more complicated than it was in the old interface.
This time, old AdWords wins: 1-1
Offering recommendations
When it comes to offering recommendations, the old version highlighted optimisation ‘Opportunities’ based on best practice. The new version overarches those opportunities and adds ‘Recommendations’.
One of the most recent additions is ad suggestions, which, based on Google support information, proposes new versions of ads created using content found in the account. Being sceptical about the quality of the ads, we manually reviewed the ones in our accounts – all the ads proved to be well composed and relevant to ad group.
It’s 2-1 for new AdWords.
Tools
The tools available in the old interface have been covered in the new AdWords, except for ‘Display Planner’, which was discontinued. When using managed placements for display, we’d ideally like to have an idea of the sizes of creatives those placements support, to efficiently use resources.
On the other hand, the new AdWords makes ‘Search Attribution’ easily available to draw behavioural insight and make informed decisions based on ‘Device Path’, ‘Path’ (campaigns), and other conversion-related data. This is much more useful tool than planning for display – and the point goes to the new interface.
This time, it’s a tie, putting the score at 3-2 for new AdWords.
Execution
From an execution perspective, Google has secured advertisers’ use of the new interface by releasing products available only through it. We’ve put together a list of setups now exclusive to the new interface:
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- Gmail Sponsored Promotion campaign setup
- Promotion extensions
- Notes Implementation – to help with the interpretation of retrospective data trends
- Advanced bid adjustments – currently only Call bid adjustments
- Ad Variation testing
- Custom Intent Audiences for Display (In-Market audience)
- Household income bidding
- Affiliate location extensions – driving shop visits for retail
- Ad extensions for call only ads
- Conversion import scheduling
Navigating through the interface and downloading reports to analyse data is something we do regularly throughout the day.
A lot of times we resort to the old interface for other tasks as well for efficiency (provided a bid management tool is not available), making the old AdWords interface indispensable. Despite the scoreboard, each interface has its own usability at the moment.