Lesson 12.2 Understanding Google Ads Interface | Free Online Digital Marketing Course in Tamil By Amudha Kumar


Google began transitioning accounts from the old AdWords (now Google Ads) interface to the new one exclusively last month, and it will continue to do so. The goal of this update is to provide advertisers with more resources to deal with the growing complexity of paid search advertising, which is becoming more prevalent.

Many new features are included in the new Google Ads interface, all of which are intended to assist advertisers in gaining the insights they need to drive performance in a hyper-competitive environment. The new interface also includes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning features that automate key optimizations, allowing advertisers to devote their time and resources to account strategy and analysis rather than technical details.

Let's take a look at some of the advantages of the new reporting and automation capabilities.

Dashboards are standard.


After logging into your Google Ads account, the first thing you'll see is an overview of your campaign's performance. As a visual dashboard, this overview displays standard performance metrics segmented by "looks," such as new words appearing in recent searches, the most frequently displayed ads, auction insights and other key metrics that allow advertisers to quickly determine the overall performance of their accounts.

One of the most significant advantages of this new dashboard is that it allows advertisers to more quickly understand the direction in which performance is trending, allowing them to make more timely optimization decisions. Paid search has always been heavily data-driven, which can lead to “paralysis by analysis” in marketers who are overwhelmed by the amount of information available.

As a solution to this problem, the new interface provides segmented metrics and recommended actions to take (which are further explained in the following section of this article), allowing advertisers to quickly steer their attention toward what is most important within an account.

Below is a sampling of some of the data that is available in the overview and can be used to make informed decisions.

Engine for making recommendations. When a campaign's actual performance compared to its goals is measured, the new interface provides a robust recommendations engine that recommends optimizations to improve performance. This engine also has the capability of performing automated optimizations that can be implemented with a few simple clicks.

The advantage of this recommendations engine is that it provides PPC marketers with optimization guidance, which helps them answer the question, "What should I do with this data?"

The ability to view “all recommendations” or recommendations segmented by categories such as bids and budgets, keywords and targeting, ads and extensions, and critical fixes that need to be made allows marketers to concentrate on the areas of the account that require the most attention at any given time.


Dashboards that are tailored to your needs. Creating custom dashboards is another advantage of the new interface, which can be found here. Within the dashboard, there are dozens of data fields that can be mixed and matched in any combination to create a real-time dashboard that contains the performance metrics that are most important to you and your organisation.

There is a wealth of information available on the standard dashboard, all of which is intended to assist you in interpreting overall account performance and identifying high-level trends and insights. What the standard dashboard does not provide is a view into the underlying drivers and leading indicators of performance, which are important for business decision-making. Advertisers can personalise reporting and track it in real time using the custom dashboard. This facilitates the advertiser's ability to quickly put together the strategies and tactics necessary to achieve the performance objectives for your account's performance goals.

Reports that have been predefined. It was the old dimension's tab in the previous ads user interface that I really liked (UI). I was able to scan the data tables in a short amount of time and quickly identify trends, opportunities, and performance anomalies. After learning that the dimensions feature was being phased out, I was concerned that advertisers would lose access to critical pieces of information that would allow them to make quick optimization and expansion choices.

Thanks to a new feature called "predefined" reports, the dimensions tab has been removed from the new user interface. This is a welcome change. Predefined reports, rather than the dimensions tab, provide more comprehensive information, in my opinion. Predefined reports provide the same information as the dimension's data, but they allow you to see the information in a more graphical format instead of text. Data visualisation makes it much easier to quickly extract the information needed to make strategic decisions when looking for trends and insights in large amounts of data.

An example of a mock predefined report that I created is shown below. Visual representation of the relationship between average position and conversion volume by day of the week is provided in this report. This data is more easily interpreted when presented visually, and I can quickly identify which days are performing the best, both in terms of average position and conversion volume. In the old UI, I would not have been able to gain insight into the relationship between the average position and conversion volume by day of the week if I had attempted this in a raw data format.

In addition to providing additional insight, the predefined report also provides additional information that was not previously available.

One important aspect to keep in mind about predefined reports is that they are static. You will need to manually change the date range of the report in order for the data to be updated with the most recent figures.


Improved targeting of specific demographics. Demographic targeting has been available in the old AdWords platform for quite some time. It was, however, difficult to understand the full scope of your account's demographic performance when using the old user interface because it was not possible to combine demographics in the old user interface. The new interface includes functionality that enables advertisers to create demographic combinations based on their target audiences. These combinations provide you with more detailed information about the demographic performance of your account.

For example, I was recently analysing the demographic performance of a client account and used a combination of gender and age to determine performance. I discovered, to my pleasant surprise, that the 65+ female demographic outperformed expectations as a result of this analysis. As the account is associated with a school, it was my expectation that older demographics would underperform. However, in light of this new insight, I'm currently in the process of refocusing the strategy in order to account for this new piece of information that has emerged.

Conclusion


Pay-per-click (PPC) managers and their associated stakeholders are constantly on the lookout for new information. The ability to discover critical new pieces of information that can be gleaned and leveraged to gain a competitive advantage is critical to achieving business success. In response, the Google Ads team created a set of reporting and insight features that address key issues, such as identifying what is working and what is not in a more detailed fashion.

Identifying these areas in a more granular manner provides advertisers with more precise guidance on which levers to pull in a given account in order to increase revenue, improve return on investment (ROI), and positively demonstrate the value of PPC to stakeholders and other stakeholders.