Share

My AdWords Feature Wish List

Published: February 11, 2014

Author: Jason Bruggemann

Share

While I was in flight one day, my laptop died on the plane, which left me with my smartphone. With limited screen size and limited functionality, I decided to read through all of the AdWords feature wish list posts from users across the world.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the AdWords feature wish list, you can go here and submit your own ideas. I can’t confirm if Google ever used it or if it is outdated; some of the ideas seem to be either outdated or come from lack of knowledge in using AdWords.
What I’ve done below was compile some of the best feature requests I came across. Since I felt the final list was a little light, I added some of my own.

1. Profiles for campaigns & settings

Create a profile for campaigns & settings across the account and schedule the profile to launch at certain times of the year, week, or day. That way everything will be organized and easy to manage. For example, create a spring profile and create campaigns or ad groups specific to the spring season. Instead of having to find many campaigns or ad groups to launch, you would just have to launch or schedule the profile. This becomes more useful the more granular your account gets.

2. Budget history

Just have another column that shows what the budget was at the time period selected. This would help out when analyzing historical data. Sure, you can see it in the change history report, but having it on the same screen as where you do analysis would make AdWords so much more functional.

3. Annotations for changes

We should be able to add notes on the changes for easier reference. Maybe even an extension on Chrome that does a better job at keeping track of the changes made. The extension can detect a change made in AdWords and ask if we want to record the change. If none of this is possible, then a better way to analyze the change history would be great – and very helpful for performance reviews over the last few months.

4. Statistics in AdWords

Incorporate statistics in AdWords for testing. That’s it.

5. More sitelink control

Why not give us this? Let’s control those sitelink spots so we can determine what’s best for our ads.

6. More control around search partners

This is probably the biggest request on the Google Moderator site. If we can control bid adjustments for certain search partners or even exclude some like we can in Bing (yea, you can do that in Bing – and yea, Bing does a better job than Google with this) then there would be a lot more happy advertisers on AdWords. Here’s how you can do it with Bing Ads.

7. Access more than one account in Editor at once

I’m not a waiting person when it comes to the interwebs and work, so downloading an account is painful to me. We should be able to download the account in the background and access another account so not a second is wasted.

8. Weighted metrics

When analyzing changes, we should have the option to add a metric that indicates how much the campaign or ad group had an effect on the changes within the time period being viewed. For example, if we see that CTR increased mightily day-over-day, instead of digging for the source we should be able to see a percentage of each source involved in the metric. Going about doing that seems hazy, but AdWords has a whole team to sort that out.
These features are some that would change mostly within the UI, but they provide huge benefits. I have many more ideas, but these seem to be the most realistic at the moment. I don’t think Google will consider my idea to run ads on every web-connected electronic display around the world with the push of a few buttons – Times Square and blimps are fair game.
That’s my list. What would you add?