New AdWords User Interface Beta: A Review

Late last week I got an invite to preview the new AdWords UI. After playing around in the interface, I thought I’d share some of the cool features with you, as well as comment on what this means for Google’s direction and for Google’s competitors. Spoiler alert: as with most things in paid search, this is another win for Google and another set-back for Google’s “competitors”, if we can still call them that.

The Line Between AdWords and Analytics (GA) is Becoming Blurred

The new interface borrows substantially from GA, both in terms of the expandable left frame navigation and the prominent and customizable graph at the top of the page. I noticed a few weeks ago that Google was encouraging AdSense publishers to integrate their AdSense account with GA. I’ve been told that Google Affiliate Network (GAN) publishers will also be able to integrate their affiliate stats with AdWords and other Google tools via GA as well. And I can only assume that once Google does something with their DoubleClick acquisition, this too will become part of the GA universe.

The Line Between AdWords and AdWords Desktop Editor is Becoming Blurred
One of the best features of Desktop Editor is the ability to view all Ad Groups or all keywords within a multi-campaign account at once. This feature is now available in the new AdWords UI and will definitely be a big time saver for those who prefer to use AdWords online instead of the Desktop Editor.

As in Editor, you can sort all of your Ad Groups or keywords by any column, so if you want to see the top click-getting keywords across all campaigns and ad groups, you can do this in a matter of seconds, as opposed to the old method of running a report to get this data.

Instant Query and Placement Karma

Yet another feature that eliminates the need to run a report is the “search query report” button. Using this feature you can instantly see which search queries got clicks off a broad match term. Pretty handy if you want to quickly add new keywords.

The same functionality exists for placements within the content network, which previously required a visit to the “placement performance” report on the reporting tab.

Better Quality Score Data

I don’t think I’ll ever be satisfied with the amount of data Google gives me on Quality Score, but this new UI at least makes the data a little more transparent and certainly a lot quicker to review. Click the thought bubble next to any keyword and your QS pops-up with details as to why you are or aren’t doing well in this category.

Overall Grade: Thumbs Up
Personally I was perfectly happy combining the old AdWords UI with the Desktop Editor, but now that I see the potential that the future of the AdWords UI might combine the best of Desktop Editor, Google Analytics, and the old UI, I have to say I am pretty excited. This is clearly an example of a better mouse trap that never occurred to me but that I am interested in using.

If you are frequent user of the Desktop Editor you have no doubt experienced some of its shortcomings – almost always due to the processing power of your computer. I’m talking about things like lengthy downloads of statistical data from Google, waiting minutes for a screen to load, or the occasional “not responding” message when you try to do too much too quickly. I’m happy to leverage the massive processing power of the Google cloud instead, all things being equal.

Oh Yahoo, Where Art Thou?
The AdWords UI and Desktop Editor were already light-years ahead of YSM (which doesn’t even have an Editor to begin with). I’ve been saying for years that YSM and MSN would do themselves a great service by simply copying Google’s UI and Editor. It appears, however, that Google is not resting on its laurels and YSM and MSN aren’t listening to my advice. The fact that Google is continuing to innovate when it already has a massive technology lead does not bode well for anyone that hopes for a more level playing field in paid search.

So kudos to the AdWords team for continuing to develop better and better tools and shame on YSM and MSN for letting Google get even farther ahead – folks, they don’t need the help! Carol and Steve, I hope you’re reading!

 

When In Doubt, Google Sets Your Geotargeting to "Worldwide"

Geo-targeting is an important filtering technique that I use for virtually every account I manage. For hyper-local campaigns (for example, a divorce lawyer who only wants to target clients within 10-15 miles of his office), I use Google’s custom targeting to create either a radius around his address, or a custom-drawn geographic region. This sort of advanced geo-targeting saves a client a lot of clicks from people who will never actually convert into customers (and thus enables them to pay more per click for the clicks that might actually convert).

It turns out, however, that the AdWords Editor doesn’t recognize custom local targeting. Why this is the case, I don’t know, but if you try to copy a custom-targeted campaign in AdWords Editor, you get the following message:

I appreciate the warning message. What I don’t appreciate is the fact that Google changes your hyper-custom targeting to the entire world! That’s right friends, the local divorce lawyer covering 10 square miles in the Northwest Suburbs of Chicago will suddenly be shown in Angola, Bangladesh, Luxembourg, and 230 other locations that are sure to drive lots of divorce-related conversions. 

This is just a ridiculous line of reasoning. Anyone who has used custom targeting almost by definition is looking for a level of granularity not available through standard DMA, city, or state-based targeting. Indeed, I can think of very few advertisers who would ever want to target the entire world (and if you did, you would be wise to set up separate campaigns by country or continent to measure performance differently and adjust bids). 

Inevitably, more than a few advertisers have not understood the pop-up warning and just assumed that their targeting would revert to the nearest city or state, or at least the US. Defaulting advertisers to the entire world is either really bad reasoning, a really lame way to make some extra money, or both.

 

Google AdWords Editor Out of (Private) Beta

This is a desktop tool we’ve been playing with for a while. Now publicly available here: http://services.google.com/adwordseditor/index.html

By the way, for those of you who read my blog regularly, you may recall my four-part post on how MSN and Yahoo can take down Google. You’ll note that Part Two of this epic posting was dedicated to user interfaces. Of course, I was suggesting that Overture change their user interface to reach parity with AdWords’ already far-superior interface. I guess now that AdWords isn’t resting on its laurels, Overture is just that much farther behind.

Since I have been using this beta for a while (and since you still apparently need a password to get in), here’s a few comments on the system so far:

Pros:

• The ability to sort keywords across your entire account by different variables (i.e., cost, impressions, alphabetically, CTR, etc). Previously, this could only be done on an AdGroup level;
• “Bulk Sheet” functionality – i.e., the ability to add thousands of listings in an Excel-style format from your desktop. This is far superior to sending an Excel sheet to a Google rep, then waiting for the rep to upload it a few days later . . .
• Moving keywords en masse from one AdGroup or Campaign to another.

Cons:

• Still very buggy. For example, we uploaded some keywords that we knew should run in the $.50 to $1.00 range and somehow all of them were listed as “Inactive” with a minimum bid of $5.00. We then deleted them and sent them to our Account Rep to upload for us instead, and voila, they were all “Active.”
• It can’t handle really big changes. My advice is to limit your work to less than 2000 keywords at a time. We’ve had several situations where the tool has simply “timed out” because our job was just too big for it.

One final point. A co-worker of mine has a conspiracy theory of sorts that I think may be quite valid. He believes that the AdWords Editor is Google’s “AdWords API for the masses.” In other words, Google wants to limit API access to a select group of “mega advertisers”, most likely companies that are spending at least $250,000 a month with Google. Thus, to reduce load time on their API servers, they have launched this desktop application which has a lot of the basic features that you can get through the API, but discourages API development for smaller players. In the end, this could save Google a lot of pain since I’m sure there are plenty of companies out there trying to develop API integration, doing a horrible job at it, and turning around and nagging Google’s product team about why the API doesn’t work.

Overall, though, I give Google a big “thumbs up” for continuing to innovate here! Keep it up!