Yesterday (May 23rd) marked the release of the newest version of everyone favorite offline campaign management tool, AdWords Editor. As we would expect, many of the new features are focused on upgrading to and managing enhanced campaigns, but there are a couple new reporting features as well. Here’s a quick rundown of what was added.
Enhanced Campaigns
The first upgrade is basically an offline version of the new Upgrade Center found in the AdWords interface. This new feature will allow you to upgrade to enhanced campaigns using either a CSV import or the add/update multiple campaigns tool.
Next comes a couple of bidding updates. With version 10.1 of AWE, advertisers will now be able to set bid adjustments for placements, topics, and audiences on the display network as well as set mobile bid multipliers at the ad group level. Setting these multipliers at the ad group level is very similar to setting bid adjustments at the campaign level, but ad group level multipliers will take priority and will not work in combination with campaign level bids.
The final feature will likely become an important feature for advertisers who use different websites for mobile and desktop experiences. You will now be able to enter ValueTrack URLs in AdWords Editor, allowing control over the {immobile} and {ifnotmobile} parameters. If you’re unfamiliar with the ValueTrack parameters, you can read more about them here.
Reporting Features
The Locations tab will now show data for each of the targeted areas within a campaign, much like in the AdWords interface. For the display network, there are two upgrades to reporting. First, the data in the Audiences and Placements tab will now match the data found in your AdWords account. Second, there will be 12 new columns on the keywords tab to show data for keywords on the display network.
Missing Pieces
Although all of these upgrades are helpful, we still feel there are some key areas of functionality missing within the AdWords Editor tool. For instance, there is still zero support for call extensions in AdWords Editor. Personally, I’m a little baffled by this as call extensions have been around for a long time now. One would think that would have been a logical upgrade a while ago. But alas, we are left to add our call extensions one campaign at a time.
The next missing upgrade really baffles me; there’s no support for enhanced sitelinks. Now when I say no support, I’m not pointing out that there’s no way to upgrade to enhanced sitelinks within AWE, nor am I saying that there’s now way to add a new enhanced sitelink. (Though those two things are true.) What I’m referring to is you cannot see enhanced sitelinks in AWE. If you’ve upgraded to enhanced sitelinks within the AdWords interface, you will not see those links within AWE. It just shows that you have no sitelinks. (I’m open to the idea of this being a fluke in my accounts, but it’s a bit weird when all of them have the same problem.)
Finally, Product Listing Ads (PLAs) and YouTube Video Campaigns also have no support within AdWords editor. With these two areas becoming more popular amongst advertisers, it would make sense that Google would include some sort of management functions for them within Editor soon. But based on the timeline for call extensions, we’ll be seeing these two added around 2017.
It’s comforting to see that Google is regularly putting out updated versions of AdWords Editor, but recently, it seems like the breadth of the system is growing faster than the functionality of the offline tool. Maybe one of these days it’ll catch up. Maybe.
Are you particularly excited or irritated by new features or those that were left out of this most recent update? Tell us all about it in the comments!
