5 New AdWords Features You Might Have Missed

In the past few weeks, Google has rolled out a number of improvements, some of which have been noticed more than others. 

Report Editor

This is undoubtedly the most visually exciting and reporting-driven feature release in a very long time. Historically, AdWords has been a great source of campaign data, but with much analysis and insight generation to be done on Microsoft Excel or other tools. The Report Editor at least aims to make it possible to explore data without having to download it. 

Our favorite features are: 

• Nice drag-and-drop interface
• Custom charts

YouTube and Native Gmail Ads in AdWords, Finally

It is nice to see Google move AdWords towards being a more centralized and consolidated ad platform. No need to separately go to "All video campaigns" in order to work with your YouTube campaigns anymore, with them being integrated straight into your workflow. Targeting groups are also replaced by ad groups, along with the addition of bulk management and reporting automation tools for YouTube campaigns. 

Gmail Ads in particular have existed for a while, but to incorporate this functionality into the AdWords interface available to all advertisers is a welcome move.

Structured Snippet Extensions

While this feature is only available in English at the moment, and is similar to call-out extensions, it has a distinct advantage especially for certain types of businesses. 

While call-out extensions are static, they are still not designed to be managed on a very granular basis. For example, imagine Hotels.com having an ad group for each hotel listed on the website, with call-out extensions highlighting the amenities available at each. 

Interactions

With all ad formats now in the same interface, Google has also added three new metrics: Interactions, Interaction Rate, and Avg Cost (per Interaction). This addresses an obvious need: having everything in the same interface can be tricky when you are interested in considering Clicks for Search and Views for YouTube. Now, you can choose Clicks and Views as the Interactions for Search and YouTube campaigns respectively.

Explore

This one is a new feature not directly in AdWords but in Google Sheets. However, for anyone who uses Google Sheets to explore data from their marketing campaigns, this one holds promise despite it being a limited early future. 

The charts are not automatically adapted to the type of data present in the spreadsheet, but when the type is appropriate, the idea that insights should be pushed rather than pulled does make sense.