After a lot of years working with the traditional Google AdWords interface, the new one now in beta was a shock.  It’s hard to quit what you know so well and what has worked so well.  But after a few weeks of playing around with the new look and feel, I think I’m going to like it. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can take a tour at Google’s new interface page, and below are some things I like and don’t like so far.

One huge thing is the whole concept of in-line editing of ads and campaigns. Instead of going to a new page and setting up a new ad or editing an old one, you can make many changes right in the first ad screen you reach. This general technique carries over for a lot of the functions in the interface and I think is one of the primary design objectives of the new version.

Another thing I like a lot is the way the Search Query report is embedded in the keywords view. In case you don’t know, the Search Query report is one of our most important ways of finding out what search terms visitors actually used when our ads were served and (maybe) clicked. Some of these are broad or phrase match, as well as exact match, so they are invaluable for finding new negative keywords as well as evaluating which sets of keywords are actually triggering the precious clicks. Now we can see these immediately without generating a long and confusing Search Query report.  And you can update your regular or negative keyword lists at the ad level directly from this report.  For a look at this interface, check out SearchMarketing Sage’s post on search query reporting.

By the way, this user enhancement did nothing to improve the mysterious way Search Query reports some clicks and not others. You will continue to see that ‘other queries’ summary at the bottom of the report without being able to see which keywords were used, even though there are often clickthroughs from these impressions.  The reasons Google gives for these bundles of unknowns are not very persuasive — I bet this fuels paranoia about Google’s expanded broad match!

The interface is still in beta and is a work in progress, so maybe the nits I want to pick with it will be fixed.  But right now there’s a couple things I dislike about it.  Ordinary negative keyword handling just plain sucks compared to the old interface with its campaign level access right next to settings edit and the ability to sweep adgroup negatives into the campaign level. And I’ve become a little dependent on Google’s insistence in telling me that my campaigns are not receiving all the possible clicks — it’s ma Google’s gentle way of reminding me I am keeping some of my client’s money away from them — but it also alerts me to opportunities to reallocate resources within the account to get more value out of it.

Overall, I think you will like this Flashy new interface (Google doesn’t need to worry about being indexed after all). It keeps the pressure on the competition, such as it is.

Interesting look at online retail sales reports from Rimm-Kaufman Group, which manages about $100 million in pay per click volume every year.  Their clients have seen a 20% decline in sales volume from about six months ago, and the volume is not yet ramping up for the holidays as it normally would.  However, the absolute number of orders due to PPC is NOT declining.  Therefore, as you would expect, the decline is due to smaller average size of order. There’s still people online; they are still buying.  Just not as much. Good news for sellers of smaller priced items.

So far the hoped-for boost from holiday sales has not yet materialized.  Bargains are in the air – stay tuned!

SEOOptimize blog recently posted on the ComScore travel study about “10 Ways to Improve your Google PPC Campaign“.  Some of these tips make sense only for the biggest businesses, but there’s information in here about the purchase decision timing and marketing targets that could be helpful for many kinds of travel businesses.  For instance, people are 30% more likely to purchase a vacation package on a Monday or Tuesday — so you might consider targeting more of your PPC budget to those days.  Everything helps in this lousy market.