AdWords’ Retail Friendly Update

Google’s AdWords is getting its first major facelift in the 15 years it has been on the market. Going forward, the online advertising platform offered by the world’s most successful search firm will be designed to help retailers (and the marketers they employ) to deliver more ads across more platforms, more effectively.

The redesign specifically looks to hone the platform’s look around a retailer’s goals — increasing conversion, driving physical traffic, pushing up app downloads — and only show them data relevant to the metrics they are actually tracking.

“From the way you express business goals to the way you measure and manage your ads, we want to make it super easy to execute and optimize campaigns based on your unique marketing objectives,” Jerry Dischler, vice president of product management, AdWords, wrote in a blog post. “You want the data you care about at your fingertips. From the campaigns that drive the most profit to the percentage of traffic coming from mobile, we want to surface insights and help you visualize them in more actionable ways. By seeing the data most relevant to your business goals, you can spend more time optimizing campaigns and identifying opportunities.”

The changes come as Google is adopting its business model and advertising offerings to a market that is rapidly shifting to a mobile-first mentality (as opposed to the desktop). AdWords’ initial design comes from the previous era of desktop dominance — and the updates today reflect that as the offerings get more complicated and extensive, retailers need a sensible way to navigate all that data.

The new interface should reflect those changes, said Andrea McFarling, director of marketing at digital marketing vendor Adlucent LLC.

“Consumers are more mobile than they ever have been before, moving seamlessly between devices and channels,” she said. “Google’s AdWords’ new user interface aligns with the way consumers are researching and purchasing products — whether that’s through paid search, YouTube videos, remarketing ads and more. The hope is that advertisers will now be able to focus on their overall business goals instead of individual activities.”

The new platform is reportedly now rolling out to selected AdWords users, as Google is gathering feedback on the program. The full redesign timeline is currently estimated at about a year.