As probably most of the larger SEM agencies are using this tool, I’m really surprised so little significant features have been added so far.

The Editor within the Corporate Strategy

As the campaigns of largest advertisers are (partly) managed by the AdWords Editor, it would be quite useful to think of improving the tool in a way that it supports the business goals both Google and the advertiser want to accomplish.

The following points are the low hanging fruit in making changes that make sense, are useful and can be easily applied:

1. Add Valuable User Data

Although it may look like there is a superior integration between AdWords and Analytics, in fact things are worse. It was just recently that AdWords goals could be connected to Analytics goals.
Furthermore, it seems that the AdWords team is really focusing on hard conversions (like sales or leads) while keeping away from soft conversions (to manage campaigns based on micro-conversions).

Not only is this bad from a marketing perspective, also it effects Google negatively from a financial perspective. For example, many advertisers who work on a CPA basis are driven away from category keywords (which are higher up in the AIDA funnel) as the conversion rate is lower for those keywords.
However, those keywords do support consumers in making their buying decision later on so can be really valuable. Actually some advanced bid management tools do recognize the value of those keywords but Google’s AdWords Conversion Tracking doesn’t.

This pushes advertisers away to the end of the funnel, which is crowded – drives up the CPC, but lowers the number of clicks on ads overall. Adding integration of soft user metrics from Analytics would be the solution (yes, that’s all). So what about adding:

1. Bounce Rates (BR)
2. Pages/Visit (P/V)
3. Time on Site (TOS)

And yes, that would make a real big difference already.

2. Add Functionalities

One of the most important reasons to visit the web interface is the visuals. The new interface makes it really great to have a quick overview of the trends in terms of clicks, impressions, conversions or whatever from an overall level down to a specific keyword.

That would be something really nice to have in the editor.

Also, I’m quite convinced that sorting on alphabet is obsolete so why not giving me more opportunities to sort keywords within ad groups in a way that makes sense?

I could even imagine using taxonomies to segment, create and sort keyword combination in a totally new way.

3. Improve Keyword Usage

Talking about keywords, conversion data in relation to keywords is really valuable information. How could Google help advertisers leveraging this data?

• Import External Conversion Data
  Every website I’ve come across so far has great converting keywords from organic, which aren’t advertised on yet.
  While the Search-based Keyword Tool should fix this, we are really looking for easy ways to get those keywords in our campaigns!

• Import Search Queries Suggestions
  Bidding ‘broad’ is really a great way to discover new keywords and keyword combinations. Google has even enhanced the reports recently. But unfortunately, we’re missing a great function: an easy import function.
  

4. Synchronized Content Network Campaign

By the way, who doesn’t use the same campaign in multiple ways like:

• Duplicate campaigns to target multiple geographical locations
• Duplicate campaigns to differ between Google search and search partners
• Duplicate campaigns to differ between search and content network

We would be really happy to have synchronized campaigns which copy any changes made to the ‘main campaign’ on-the-fly, but do apply only specific changes like targeting or bidding options.

It could just be a small thing like the domain extension www.ConversionStream.com for US and www.ConversionStream.co.uk for UK in the ad texts (we are all a little bit lazy, right?).

5. Campaign Tracking With the Pound Sign

Any SEO should have a preference for clean, short and user-friendly URL’s. Although the priority of these uses have been significantly lowered since the search engines have helped us by introducing a specific link element it can still bother, i.e. in the case when users link to URL’s with parameters and generate duplicate content.

If you integrate AdWords data with Analytics, you’ll recognize the gclid-parameter in the URL. In fact this is a new URL, but I won’t go in details on that point now.

While there is a small change to your tracking script necessary, you just need to understand a pound sign (#) is much sexier than a question mark sign (?).

Share Your Thoughts

It would be great to list up more requested features here. What is it that you would like to add?