New Google AdWords Interface in Beta

A very small test group of US advertisers are reported to be testing the updated web interface for AdWords. The new interface looks to help give PPC advertisers clearer insights into their ad campaigns and provide them with simple ways to act on those insights.

AdWords advertisers will be pleased to hear the updates won’t affect how their ads run. Bidding, ranking, Quality Score, and the other key AdWords performance fundamentals are not changing with the updates.

Instead the updates are concentrating on changing the ways AdWords advertisers see and manage the campaign data in their accounts. The changes being made are aimed to make it easier to tackle common tasks, like navigating between campaigns and editing keywords across several ad groups.

The beta testing to the web interface has allowed the AdWords team to test the changes to and make improvements based on tester comments. Plans are afoot to increase the numbers of PPC advertisers testing the updated interface, which will gradually see the beta version being made available to international testers in the coming months.

The rumour mill is buzzing with the reports that the ‘Account Snapshot’ page is set to become a more interactive ‘dashboard’ in the style of Google Analytics, where advertisers can choose what information this page displays.

Many advertisers will see this as big a step forward in analysing their campaigns so they can attain the information they require quickly and easily. For most advertisers the ‘Account Snapshot’ page does not currently hold much value – most making the ‘Campaign Summary’ their default starting page – with even recent improvements to the Snapshot page failing to, yet again, whet advertisers appetites.

Let’s hope advertisers get their way and we see the ‘Account Snapshot’ page increasing in importance and becoming more interactive, allowing users to pick and choose the stats they want to see displayed in a more user-friendly way. Surely this new update would also follow the same functionality as Google Analytics, with the dashboard offering an export function and automatic email reporting available.

It does remain to be seen whether the rumours are true or not, and only time will tell, but the Analytics Dashboard-esque feature would be a welcome reward for most pay-per-click advertisers – including us!

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