Less than two weeks ago, Google AdWords announced the rolling out of dashboards, a single place to collect and prioritize the reporting of your campaign data. Since this announcement, websites have been posting in excitement for this new feature, and the benefits they expect for businesses’ insight. Will you be one of them?
I mean, look how fine it is!
But is it all it’s cut out to be, or is it too good to be true?
What AdWords Dashboard Offers
Customized Views of Data
You’re in control of how your reports are organized and presented, based on what you value as important information. It’s also flexible, allowing you to arrange your charts and tables in the most effective way for you and your team. This is applicable to both existing, saved tables/charts that you can add, and new tables/charts you can create on the spot. The easy-to-navigate date ranges allow for historic data to remain applicable for comparison’s sake.
Monitor Performance in One Place
The inconvenience of navigating across several tabs and reports to monitor account performance is no more! The most important tables and charts can now be designated in one place. The relationships between data, patterns, and trends can be seen as one big, pretty picture.
Collaborate & Share with The Team
If you’re a collaborative bunch like us and work with multiple people on the same AdWords account, you can build and review these dashboards as a collective. Under the Reports tab, you’ll find all the dashboards in an account listed, simple as that!
Early Concerns
It’s Great…If You Know How To Customize
While the idea of creating your own dashboard sounds wonderful, there is a risk of overlooking important metrics and results. How do we know if we’re setting up the best summary for our own campaigns, or those of our clients? Fear not! There is a help page and guided tour for those creating their first dashboard. Because this is still rolling out over the next few weeks, we can anticipate more resources through Google further down the road. This specific concern, however, is the perfect opportunity to go over with your team what the goals of your campaigns are, what metrics will determine your definition of success, and the specifics you’re aiming to improve in order to get there.
Is This Really More Effective? How Will This Compare to Other Solutions?
As can be expected with any large platform/software update, there is some user adaptation to be had. Reluctance is currently being shared amongst users on message boards regarding this subject. The concerns seem to be the choppiness and incomplete picture the dashboard provides, and how for some industries it doesn’t make sense to limit themselves to a super basic scope. Many users are remaining not only on older views of their data but on the older UI altogether.
While we still have yet to fully experience this latest feature, we are interested to see how other similar services will respond. The team at Obility anticipates this being, for some users, an advantageous addition to the already dominant force that is Google AdWords (that is, if and when the world is used to its new structure).
