Since Its inception, Adwords has grown leaps and bounds. With each passing year, its popularity among Advertising Professionals has grown exponentially and so has the way its being used by them. Keeping up with the Google way of innovating and continually developing itself, the Google team has, after consultation with the very professionals who use it, released the new Adwords Interface.

Currently its available as an option on currently active Campaigns for a period of 30 days, i.e. users can switch between the old and new interfaces at will as they get accustomed to the update. Any new Accounts created have just the new interface.

Let us now take a look at what has really changed from the old to the new.

As soon as you look at the screen, you notice the left navigation that has been added. It has an Adwords Editor like feel to it, i.e., it follows a tree structure which mirrors the one in the Adwords Editor. This makes navigation far easier as you can browse the entire account at one click. If you wish, you can still use the links at the top to navigate through the account.

Navigation in the New Interface

Also, you can just click on the Keywords/Ads tab at any level of hierarchy to see all the contents at that level, something which was not available in the previous interface. This makes analyzing performance across adgroups/campaigns far easier. Gone are the times when one had to generate a report just to look at figures from across adgroups at a time, now it’s possible at the click of a tab. Makes life a whole lot simpler!

Keywords in the Old Interface

Keywords Tab in New Interface

Another Striking Feature, which can be noticed in the image above, is the inclusion of graphs, similar to those seen in Google Analytics. Now, performance trends can be spotted fairly easily by selecting metrics and a date range over which the comparison is required.

Performance Graphs in the New Interface

Filters let you define specific rules for which you can see keywords, ads, placements. This allows the segregation of keywords which aren’t performing well, or ads which have CTR above 1.5%.

Customised Filters

The Campaign creation process has been immensely simplified with the new interface. Ads, Keywords, Bids can be created/set in any order using the tabs used for managing a campaign once the adgroups are created.

The New Campaign Creation Screen

One reason why everyone preferred the Adwords Editor to edit their PPC Campaigns was the ease with which basic keyword editing was done. This has been incorporated within the new interface, making it possible for one to edit keywords, etc inline itself.

Inline Editing

These were just some of the brilliant features that Google is providing us with its new interface. In a nutshell, its combined features from the Adwords Editor and Analytics to make the Adwords Experience a whole lot better!

Selecting the correct keywords is the essence of any SEO Project. There are many tools available to help you find the most relevant keywords for your website

The Search-based Keyword Tool generates keyword and landing page ideas highly relevant and specific to your website. In doing so, the tool helps you identify additional advertising opportunities that aren’t currently being used in your AdWords ad campaigns.

The main difference between the Search-based Keyword Tool and the Keyword Tool currently used in AdWords is that the former generates keyword ideas based on your website content, and identifies those currently not being used in your AdWords account. Also, the Search-based Keyword Tool provides more detailed data for each keyword, such as category information, suggested bid that may place the ad in the top three spots of a search results page, and ad/search share.

You may observe that some of the parameters such as monthly search volume may vary slightly between the two tools due to different methods of calculations used.

Recession has hit several sectors including the top PPC spenders like Finance, insurance and travel.

We have been running a PPC campaign in the banking and financial space since over a year now, and this is the first time that we’re seeing a substantial fall in cost per click even when the avg. positions have moved up.

Cost Per Click versus Avg Position - Google Adwords

The average cost per click in the first week of December has been $1.77 for an avg. position of 7.2. Compare this with February 2008, when a cost per click of $1.82 got us a position of 8.6.

There are several other SEM campaigns where we have seen a similar trend allowing us to safely conclude that some semblance of sanity is now returning to the way people have been bidding on their adwords campaigns.