Today I want to talk about one of the features in the new AdWords interface that has been much improved compared to the legacy interface: the Overview page.
I don’t know about you, but I rarely used the Home tab in the AdWords interface. With the new experience, I’ve really come to love the Overview page and have already used it more times than I did the Home tab.
What is the Updated AdWords Overview Page?
The Overview page shows a selection of cards featuring performance highlights created for you by Google. Each card is designed to focus on one aspect of your account’s performance.
All Overview pages include a summary card with a line chart that lets you compare the past performance of your metrics. You can compare up to 4 key metrics at a time and hover over the line chart to get more data for a specific time.
You can change the date range for all the cards with the date selector or compare date ranges to see performance changes during different time periods.
The cards on the Overview page are selected by Google automatically based on your campaign settings and account performance. You can’t change the types of cards that appear, but you can refine what information each card shows by changing the metric of the card from the drop-down next to the metric name.
Google will be adding more types of cards over time, so keep checking your Overview page on a regular basis to see what new cards are released.
How to Change the Overview Page Scope
When you sign in to your account, your Overview page will show you account-level data. If you click on a campaign or ad group, you’ll see data about those items instead.
There are two ways to get to the Overview page for a specific campaign or ad group:
- In the Campaigns card on the account-level Overview page, click the name of the campaign you’d like to see data for. You can drill down one more level from the campaign-level Overview page by clicking the name of the ad group within the Ad groups card that you’d like to see data for.
To get back to the all campaign view, click on the account name in the breadcrumb at the top of the Overview page.
- The other option is to click the name of the campaign in the navigation panel along the far left side and then click Overview in the page menu.
The cards on the page and their data will change depending on what level of your account you’re viewing. Overview pages include two types of cards: summary cards and insight cards.
Summary Cards
Summary cards show you a general summary of your performance over the date range of your choosing. Different summary cards will show for the account, campaign, or ad group levels.
Types of summary cards include:
- Auction Insights data
- Audiences for Display and Video networks
- Biggest changes to your campaigns and ad groups
- Geographic location of people who interacted with your ads
- Keywords for Display and Video networks
- Most-shown ads
- Performance by day of week and time of day
- Performance by device
- Performance by keyword
- Placements for Display and Video networks
- Remarketing reach
- Status review
- Top products for Shopping
- Top performing campaigns and ad groups
- Top search terms on Google.com that caused your ads to display
- Top videos
- Topics for Display and Video networks
Insight Cards
Insight cards let you know about important observations of your account performance and will only appear when interesting patterns in your data arise. These cards will show above summary cards on the Overview page and are not related to the date range you selected.
Device Shift
This card lets you know when there’s a significant change in the percentage of your ad impressions that came from a specific type of device. If most of your impressions typically come from one type of device and that has changed recently, you’ll see this card appear.
Hourly Performance Pacing
This card lets you know when your clicks are unusually high or low on a particular day. If you tend to get a certain number of clicks by 8 am on Mondays, this card will let you know if you’re under or over that amount. This card will show until the end of the day or until your clicks return to the day’s average.
New Words
This card shows you new words that people used while searching and finding your ads. You will likely see this card more often if you are running many broad match keywords.
Top vs. Other
This card lets you know if there’s been a change in how often your ads show above search results compared to showing at the bottom of the page. For example, if most of your impressions typically happen above the organic search results and now impressions are shifting to below organic results, you’ll see this card appear.
Conclusion
If you haven’t already, I recommend spending some time looking through the Overview pages for your accounts. I’ve gotten into the habit of looking here first each time I open an account especially to see if any insight cards have popped up that day.
In my next post, we’ll take a deeper dive into the Summary cards and how to use the information they provide to optimize your accounts.
What do you think of the Overview page in the new AdWords interface? Let us know in the comments below!
