The Overview page of the New AdWords Experience - as Google calls the current beta version of the AdWords admin interface - highlights flexible views of key campaign metrics, making checking your most important performance indicators a matter of just a few minutes.

If when you log in to your AdWords account and open a campaign you don’t see the new interface (Google AdWords BETA at top left), click the gear icon (Billing, account settings and help) at top right, then click “Try the faster AdWords BETA”.

Having done that, you should be looking now at an Overview page with a plot of daily Impressions and Clicks at the top.

Keywords

Below the Impressions and Clicks chart the new interface displays the Top 5 keywords, ranked high-to-low or low-to-high on your choice of up to 12 metrics, depending on what AdWords features you’re using. In the example below, keywords are ranked on Clicks high-to-low. And you can see the other sort options also.

In the AdWords interface, mousing over a keyword will display counts of impressions and clicks.

Clicking on ALL KEYWORDS> will reveal full stats.

Search Terms

Search terms look like keywords, but with an important difference: they came from the brains of the people who got to your website by clicking on one of your AdWords ads. Which means they reveal the language that your prospects are using to search for what you’re selling. That’s an important piece of information, because we may be missing out on potential clickthroughs because our ads and keywords are written from a tourism-industry-insider viewpoint, using different words than those used by normal people.

Example: We’ve seen UK tour operators using the keyword phrase “bespoke tours” in AdWords campaigns targeting the USA. Few Americans would search on that term when looking for a “custom” or “individualized” tour.

Again Google gives you a choice of several metrics on which to identify the top search terms used by people who clicked on your ads.

And a bonus: in the AdWords interface, mousing over a search term will display your keyword(s) that resulted in a clickthrough from that search term, along with counts of impressions and clicks.

Clicking on ALL SEARCH TERMS> will reveal full stats.

Devices

The new AdWords interface simultaneously displays 3 bar charts showing relative use of mobile phones, tablets and desktops by users who reached your site via AdWords. Once again, you can pick the metrics you want to see.

And mousing over any section of any bar chart will display absolute numbers and shares of the active metric for that device.

Clicking on DEVICES> will reveal full stats.

I'll take deeper dives into the new interface in later posts.

So far, what do you most like and/or dislike about the New AdWords Experience? Let me know and we’ll pass it along to Google.