Creatalytics by Matthew Burgess

A new AdWords interface is in beta. Have you seen it? What do you think?

I used it just a bit today, and here are some comments that I just wrote up on the Search Engine Professionals group discussion on LinkedIn:

I think the expandable tree menu on the left (like in AdWords Editor) is helpful. I drill up and drill down a lot between ad groups and campaigns, and this feature saves time.

In my opinion, there is a lot of polishing that needs to be done before this will be my preferred interface. A couple things that bug me:

The page renders with an absolute width. And the columns do not resize, either dynamically or manually. So with a reasonable number of columns, I’m constantly having to scroll left and right to see my data. Not helpful.

And since the Date Range and Filter features are right justified, I can’t even see then unless I scroll over. I spend a lot of time changing the time period to get different views, so this function should not be lost off the right side of the page.

The charts…well, I’m a chart guy, through and through. But I find this particular implementation to be a waste of screen real estate. But there are little tweaks that could make this more a valuable use of space. One would be to allow for the charting of individual keywords in an ad group. That is, choose which KWs are charted. Averages don’t help me much. Avinash Kaushik, the Google Analytics evangelist, would probably have a fit if he saw this charting.

Filtering looks very cool, but I haven’t tried it. Perhaps this is where you can at least do some segmentation to do quick analyses. But the chart is still showing aggregate values for measures across multiple keywords.

I like that charting allows for 2 measures. But very often, I also like to look at the same measure for multiple keywords (or ad groups). That would be nice.

In-line editing of keywords? Well, I might use this to change a bid…maybe, but other than that, it’s a feature that I feel encourages irresponsible campaign management. Even their little video on it made my heart skip a beat when they showed something that so deviated from best practices. Under no circumstances would I ever change a keyword. Or its match type, which to me is a different keyword. For data integrity, each keyword is an entity that must persist. If I want to try a variation of a keyword (including match type variations), I create a new keyword, track it, optimize it, etc. So I’m not really sure what they were thinking with that.

Bid changing in-line will definately save time, but I rarely change bids in the AdWords interface anymore: it’s either AWE or API via bid mgmt tools.

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Google PPC by Matthew Burgess