What Should You Expect From The New Adwords Interface?

The prospect of a new AdWords interface has been touted for a good few months now and has finally arrived. It’s been rolled out, at least in part, to most accounts and you should now be able to access some of the new tools once you log on. Google seem to be releasing a few things over time rather than all at once and there are some other tools that will become available over the next year or 18 months.

AdWords has long been a key tool in advertising for hotels and for many marketers, has become the industry standard. One thing to note is that there has been a little tweaking of the terminology on the new interface. Google AdWords allows you to currently toggle between the old and new interface but expect this to change sometime in the very near future. Here are some key changes on the new interface that you might want to look out for.

Promotion Extensions

These give you the option to link to a specific offer in text ads. That means you can use them to promote hotel room discounts or special events that are coming up on your calendar. Google AdWords say that this will make your promotion stand out more to potential customers. The link appears in a bold label on the ad and they are easy to update and edit.

Target Household Income in Search

The demographics tab has had household income added as a targeting measure, all of which shows how your campaign is performing with different customers. This can give marketers working on advertising for hotels a better insight into what works for different income streams.

The Audiences Page

Audience targeting should be a little easier with the new Google AdWords interface and allow you to manage and optimise performance a lot better. It should mean that segmenting audiences according to various parameters is streamlined with the option to customise a lot more closely.

Inclusion of N-Grams

A little change that could well be useful is the introduction of N-grams. Basically it means keywords that receive more attention in searches will show up in a box that’s a little darker than the rest. Put your mouse pointer or hover over the box and you should see a pop-up list of search phrases where the word was used.

Bid Adjustments for Interactions

Click to call ads have been around for a while but you can now adjust how often this appears in a particular ad. When advertising for hotels, whether you use this tool will depend on what you’re advertising and whether connecting via a call is the best option for converting to a sale, for example, encouraging last minute bookings.

Other Inclusions TBA

Not all of the Google AdWords interface is on show right now and there are some changes in the pipeline that we should see in the next year or so. These include:

• Better insights between landing pages and performance, particularly when it comes to mobile.
• A Google attributions interface is expected before the end of the year which should provide users with a better options to understand how marketing campaigns are working.

If you’re tasked with hotel marketing, the changes to the Google interface may not seem ground-breaking but they could provide a new and easier way to create campaigns and measure them. As is so often the case with Google, we’re not getting everything at once so it’s worth looking out for updates, particularly over the next couple of years.