The New AdWords Experience, and Call Bid Adjustments

Today the Atria blog will focus on two new aspects of AdWords.

First, we’ll talk about the New AdWords Experience, which is Google’s branding of the new graphical interface users are seeing in their AdWords dashboards. Then we’ll discuss a new, exciting feature that comes exclusively with that experience: call bid adjustments.

A New Graphical Interface

Google has been working hard to improve the online advertisement creation and monitoring process for its customers. The result of its effort, called the New AdWords Experience, is the latest graphical interface you may already see when you log in to your AdWords account. If you don’t see it now, you will soon because the revamped look will have reached everyone by the end of 2017.

Let’s look at the basic outline you will want to familiarize yourself with. For a deeper look, you can find Google’s help page here.

Overview: When you first enter AdWords, you will see an Overview page that shows some basic statistics about your ads’ collective performance. Clicks, conversions, costs, and impressions are all shown in a prominent multi-level line graph at the center of the screen. Below that broad stroke, you can see a pair of bar graphs for Biggest Changes and Campaigns that, respectively, show your ads that have gained the most money this month and the basic cost and conversion information related to your multiple campaigns.

This differs from the past user interface that showed a single-level line graph below multiple tabs for filtering what was shown. The new look uses color to define various fields for easy comparison of statistics.

Navigation Panel: You can gain a deeper look at each of your campaigns by using the new Navigation Panel, which remains hidden to the left of the screen. When you hover over the panel or click its nested arrow at the top-left of the screen, you can select individual campaigns and view each one’s performance.

Page Menu: Like the Navigation Panel, the Page Menu remains to the left of the screen. It offers finer detail than the Navigation Panel with options such as Keywords, Demographics, and Settings so you can change the preferences for ads and ad groups. The Navigation Panel hides to reveal the Page Menu underneath.

As you might have guessed, the Navigation Panel and Page Menu replace the navigation you know from the classic AdWords layout. The two new menus intend to streamline the look of AdWords and make it easier to select campaigns and make changes to them.

Although you can return to the previous version of AdWords by clicking the gear icon in the top-right corner of the display, there are some features such as call bid adjustments that will only make an appearance in the new version.

Maximizing Conversions With More Calls

Many AdWords customers already use click-to-call ads, which have been available for many years. They have proven effective at generating conversions, so users have asked Google to help them drive more traffic to their businesses’ phones. This is what call bid adjustments mean to do.

Users of the New AdWords Experience can now mark their campaigns for how often those ads will display a click-to-call option. If a user says he wants to display click-to-call 50 percent of the time, for instance, AdWords will then increase bids specifically for his ads that will reach users willing to call about a product or service.

Call bid adjustments make it possible for ads to be selective about who sees web options and who sees phone-based options.

As a business owner, you know that customers sometimes want to complete a purchase quickly by speaking to an alert representative. They might also want to speak to a professional about a complicated issue such as medical equipment or marketing. When you want individuals to reach you as these types of situations occur, placing a phone number in your ads makes sense.

You can portion your budget with your needs as a business, leaving space both for ads that primarily address web users and phone users. Getting the portions just right, however, can be a challenging task. Atria professionals can help you gain a better grasp of the new AdWords layout, and they can help you determine the best percentage of click-to-call ads you will want to show to your customers.

Give us a call today for any assistance you need.