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My Thoughts On The Adwords Facelift
Upon loading up the new interface, the first thing that I noticed was the change of colors. Well, actually, the first thing I noticed was that it wasn’t loading properly. In the orange box there is a message saying: “The updated AdWords interface may not work properly in your web browser. We are working hard to add support for more browsers. Until then, please use Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3, or Chrome to manage your campaigns. The updated AdWords interface may be slower on older versions of Firefox. For better results, we recommend upgrading to Firefox 3.” AdWords doesn't work properly with all browsers. Since I am still rocking Firefox 2.0 (some of the add-ons that I love haven’t updated for Firefox 3 yet) I keep getting that message EVERY TIME I LOAD AN ACCOUNT. We have over 100 accounts in our My Client Center, so I am constantly bouncing between different accounts. Meaning, I have to see that message pop up constantly. For a company whose motto is “Don’t be Evil,” they are slowly driving me insane. Anyway, as you can see, the page clearly doesn’t load correctly. The colors have also been tweaked with the green being a little darker and a graph tracking spend above the different campaigns. I think that this is the thing that bothers me the most about the new interface. But then again, I am the guy that changes the start menu and color scheme of any new computer back to Windows 98. I just don’t see why they couldn’t add in these new features while keeping the look of the old AdWords. Personally, I hope that they start offering themes for AdWords like they do with iGoogle and Gmail. As for the features Google added, I really couldn’t complain once I learned how to use them. I really like how you can edit bids for a campaign without having to go into the actual ad group. I just wish that they would do something similar for changing ads. Also the changes in how you pause ads took me a few clicks to figure out and could be done a little smother. Keywords and AdGroups bids are easy to change. Google also added a one step way to add new ad groups. Now you can create you ad, list your keywords, and enter your bids all on the same form. This is something that I have been wanting from a major ad platform for quite a while. This is really important for this new interface because it is slower. I never really had a problem waiting for pages to load on the old interface, but now I see a loading message quite often. Also, I kept running into pages where buttons wouldn’t load. The first time I tried adding an ad group in one step the “Save ad group” button did not appear. At first I thought I was just missing something on the page because I couldn’t submit it. But once I went back and tried it again, the buttons showed up. Could be useful it the order was relevant. Another new feature is the Account Tree that AdWords Editor has. I usually have this minimized because I feel it makes the screen too cluttered. Also, it lists all the accounts in each campaign in alphabetical order and all paused of deleted ad groups are grayed out. The fact that they are in alphabetical order is ridiculous. Often times, about half of the campaigns I have listed are grayed out. These should be at the bottom of the list, or they should be ordered by ad spend. Overall, I don’t mind the new interface to this AdWords after I used it for a little while. I would have rather just seen these changes slowly added to the old interface though. But it does make you wonder why Yahoo and MSNs ad interfaces are still so bad. If the platform with the best interface is doing a facelift, why are the others not trying to catch up to at least where Google was? But what do you guys think? What do you like or hate about the new Google interface? Do you think MSN and Yahoo will ever have a platform that can rival Google in ease? Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com |
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