Google AdWords: What's new, and what does it mean to you?

If you're a frequent user of Google AdWords, you may have noticed the gradual rollout of their new interface as it's tested with select advertisers.

As a data and insights-driven company that integrates with Google AdWords, we're looking forward to the upgrades that will help us drive efficiencies in both our customers' campaigns and our own. We've had time to get to grips with it and below we'll unearth the valuable changes that you need to know about, which lay underneath the platform's slick new aesthetic and faster performance:

Advanced bid adjustments for calls

Customers tend to prefer to conduct high value orders with a conversation, so the ability to customise your bid to increase phone calls will be an attractive one for many businesses. You can adjust your bidding for mobile devices to change the frequency that you display call interaction ads to mobile users too. This influences how potential customers interact with your business, as you influence how often you show call extensions and call-only ads to them.

This functionality highlights the importance that Google assigns to phone calls, and that a flexible, informed approach will produce the greatest results. Maintaining a clear view of where your calls are coming from is an essential part of optimising your strategy to match how people are responding to your campaigns.

Easy analytics with updated UI

The revamped interface has been designed with reporting clarity in mind. Firstly, your AdWords scheduling can now be performed with greater insights due to the introduction of heat maps that demonstrate how your campaigns are performing throughout the week and what hours are generating the most clicks.

Not only that, but you are now able to analyse the rate of clicks, cost, and conversions among phone, desktop, and tablet. This will inform your strategy regarding the amount you bid for each device.

Boosted demographic targeting

Google's demographic targeting options have been expanded to allow PPC marketers to target by parental status and household income, on top of existing demographic options. Previously, parental status was only available to display customers, and income couldn't be targeted on an individual basis. This is a major benefit to brands who want to take advantage of customers with different needs, or seasonal events, such as optimising travel offerings to parents looking for somewhere to go in the school holidays.

Campaign groups

Join together similar campaigns and set performance targets for them, such as CPA or total conversions. This is useful for marketers who take a segmented approach to targeting, but still need an overall view of the wider campaign.

Highlight sales and promotions

Promotion extensions emphasise the timeliness of an offer or a sale, such as special deals for Christmas, Father's Day or back-to-school. These extensions are free to add, and give users more opportunities to click on your ad. They're easy to set-up alongside your existing data and campaigns, and the clicks are priced exactly the same regardless of where they click on the ad.

What's not included yet?

The "import from clicks" conversions type is currently missing from the new platform. This is how you would set up a conversion type to receive your Infinity Calls or Goals. But fear not, if you need this then you simply have to switch back to the old interface to set these up for the time being. Luckily, this only needs to be a temporary fix, as Google have told us that this is likely to be brought over in Q3 or Q4 this year.

Other things not yet available include:

• Ad extension creation, management, and reporting for price extensions; extension segments; and the automated extensions report
• Bid adjustments for targeting methods
• Advanced editing (automated rules, bulk uploads, copy/paste)
• AdWords Labs
• Business data and shared library
• Custom remarketing/affinities
• Geographic reports

As mentioned above, for these features you'll need to revert to the old version of AdWords, but we expect them to be added shortly.

Seeing your calls in the new interface

Once you have set up conversions for Infinity calls in the old interface, you can see them in the conversions tab of the new interface. To see the split of conversion types, add a segment as you did previously. This also works for existing ones that you made in the old interface before transferring to the new one.

What do you think?

We've been using the new AdWords platform for a few days now and are still noticing new tweaks and changes to it, if there's anything that's caught your eye then we'd love you to Tweet it to us as @_Infinity_co and we'll check it out.

If you're spending money on PPC in a business that receives phone calls for support, enquiries, or sales, do you know what keywords are driving customers to pick up the phone? If not, you're leaving your profit margins to guesswork. Contact us today to see how call tracking attributes revenue, saves on what's not working, and optimises your web journeys.