Recently, Google released Adwords Editor version 11 and sunsetted version 10. Much has been said about how great the new Editor is. It does have many features that the old version lacked, such as support for labels, shared library, and other features.

I think it sucks.

Now, part of the reason I don’t like the new Adwords Editor is because I’m not a fan of forced change. We all get used to a certain workflow, and it’s disruptive and frustrating to change it. But the new Editor has several huge flaws.

It’s crash-prone.

I noticed a few crashes when I first downloaded Editor 11, but others are still having issues.

Yep, 6 hours of work lost due to this thing crashing. I probably would have jumped out the window in frustration. Or at least written a few nasty tweets to Adwords. And note that Theresa said it took 6 hours to do something that would have taken 5 minutes in the old Editor. Wow.

The navigation is all messed up.

The old Adwords Editor had tabs across the top for Campaigns, Ads, Ad Groups, and Keywords, just like the online UI does.

The new one moved all that stuff down to the lower left hand corner, below the tree view.

Not only has it moved to a totally different location on the page, but it’s now in text only, rather than a picture-like graphic layout. It’s easier to find what you’re looking for in a graphic square, like the old Editor, rather than in a long list of text, like the new one.

The font is dinky.

Speaking of finding stuff, the font in the new Editor is tiny and hard to read. I realize it may be more Google-ish-looking, but it’s so small that my old eyes have trouble, especially when I’m working in Editor all day. I think part of the problem is the font itself – there’s less kerning between the letters – and part is the fact that nothing is graphic, so the eye isn’t drawn to anything.

Menu navigation requires extra clicks.

Used to be, you’d click on the Ads tab, for instance, and see all the ads for whatever you’d selected in the tree – entire account, campaign, or ad group. Now, the tree is nearly useless. You select a campaign in the tree, then you click the Ads section in the lower left, and sometimes you see ads and sometimes you don’t. Look at this example for a call-only campaign:

Clicking on “ads and extensions” doesn’t show all your ads and extensions. It defaults to “Text Ads.” It took me several tries to figure out that I had to then click AGAIN on “Call-Only ads” to see my ads. This is 2-3 extra clicks beyond what was needed in the old Editor.

Now, I’m sure I’ll get used to these lovely new features, just like I got used to Enhanced Campaigns. But right now, I’m not a fan. Especially when the workflow takes so many extra clicks. Even an extra 2-3 clicks adds up when you’re working with hundreds of ad groups.

I do like being able to open multiple accounts at once, among other things about the new Editor. But it leaves a lot to be desired.

What do you think? Is Adwords Editor 11 a godsend, or has it killed your workflow mojo? Share in the comments!

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As you probably know, I work for an agency that deals strictly with B2B clients. B2B offers unique challenges for PPC, including lead tracking and pricey CPCs due to competition.

For years, Google Adwords has been our bread and butter. Their sheer market share makes them a must-use for B2B advertisers. But I’ve started to think that Google hates B2B advertisers. Here’s why.

Sitelinks Don’t Always Apply

I’ve written before about why sitelinks can be a worst practice, especially for B2B clients. In mid-2014, Google launched Dynamic Sitelinks – an even bigger nightmare for B2B advertisers than regular sitelinks. At least with regular sitelinks, we could just not add them. But now, it seems we’re stuck with them whether we want them or not.

Granted, Bing Ads also has dynamic sitelinks. I don’t like those any better than Google’s. But I wonder if Bing would have launched them if Google didn’t do it first.

Keyword Planner Suggestions Are B2C-Focused

I’ve long been frustrated with Google’s keyword planner and the crazy suggestions it offers. That’s the case whether you’re B2B or B2C. But what’s even more frustrating to me is that the keywords it suggests tend to be very consumer-focused. Even with something that’s obviously B2B like “business management systems,” it’ll come back with things like “what is a business management system” – not the type of queries an enterprise-level person researching a solution would use.

The Opportunities tab suggestions are even worse. Earlier this week I was reviewing Google’s “optimization” ideas for a client that offers a solution for businesses to sell gift cards to customers. Here are some of the “opportunities” Google wanted us to add to our campaign:

sell unwanted gift cards for cash
sell your gift card for cash
where can i cash gift cards
how to trade gift cards for cash
can i buy gift cards with a gift card
getting cash for gift cards
sell back giftcards for cash

These queries are clearly ones that would be used by consumers looking to offload unwanted gift cards – the exact opposite of what we’d want to bid on!

The only good part about this awful list is I used them for negative keywords instead. I’m sure that’s not what Google had in mind as an “opportunity,” but I took it nonetheless.

 Display Interest Targeting Is All B2C

Google has announced that starting next week, they’re retiring the Other Interests targeting option for Display campaigns. Doesn’t sound like a big deal – unless you’re a B2B advertiser.

Nearly all the B2B-focused targeting options are in the Other Interests category:

We’re left with affinity audiences, or in-market segments. Check out the fine selection of options in affinity audiences:

See anything that looks remotely B2B-focused? Me neither.

In-market audiences are a little better, but not much. Here’s a view of the Business Services options:

Not awful – but we have clients who don’t fit into any of these categories. For those clients, we’ll be relegated to keyword or placement targeting, which doesn’t always perform as well. Clearly, Google has a bias toward B2C for display campaigns.

I’m sure there is a reason for this, probably because most of Google’s advertisers are B2C. But B2B advertisers have big bucks to spend. Many of their products and services are big-ticket items, and companies are willing to pay very high CPCs to advertise them. I rarely see CPCs below $20 in search for my clients. You’d think Google would want this money, but maybe not.

What do you think? Have your B2B clients struggled with Google’s B2C bias? Found any workarounds? Share in the comments!

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Ever try navigating within your PPC account and seen this?

It’s affectionately called the “red bar of death” by PPC advertisers, and it used to show up relatively infrequently. Starting about a month ago, I noticed more and more tweets on the PPC Chat hashtag from people saying they were seeing the red bar of death. Most of the tweets at that time were from our friends in the UK and Europe, so I figured something was going on over there.

Then I started seeing it myself, more and more. Then I saw this:

And this:

Mountain View, we have a problem.

It seems as though everyone is seeing the Adwords red bar of death:

It’s gone beyond ridiculous at this point. Twitter users point out that the issue happens in nearly every instance of Adwords daily usage: in every browser, navigating from one campaign to another, filtering, segmenting, editing… the list goes on. And nothing we do seems to make it go away for more than a day or so.

Adwords has maintained near-silence the whole time this has been going on. Last week, after the tweet I sent in the image above asking why the silence, they finally sent me a direct message on Twitter.

The DM contained a link to report the problems I was having. Finally! I thought. We can all get a resolution on this, if for no other reason than to bombard Adwords with form fills from the sheer number of PPC pros having this problem. So I tweeted out the link.

I promptly got another DM from Adwords – this time, asking me to delete the tweet. Why? Because apparently they handle these issues on an individual basis, so the form was meant for “specific cases” only.

Fair enough. But newsflash, Adwords: TONS of users are having the same problem, and it’s gone on for weeks! Why create a form meant for single users when this is a nearly universal problem? It almost seems like you’re underestimating the extent of the issue.

To their credit, Adwords did send me a public link to contact support, and I deleted my earlier tweet and sent this out instead. But this is just a link to their general support options. We all know how well that works (i.e., it doesn’t). Meanwhile, we’re still getting the red bar of death and other errors on a daily basis.

Hey Google, in case you haven’t noticed, the holidays are fast approaching. PPC advertisers need to get all their holiday campaigns teed up, launched, and managed. We don’t have time for continual outages and errors. Several people said they couldn’t access their shopping campaigns at all yesterday. That’s a major problem.

This fiasco is yet another indication that Google may be getting too big to fail. And it’s not the first time we’ve gotten terrible support from Adwords. But this goes beyond silly feature announcements and uneducated reps. This is a system-wide, worldwide outage that’s been going on for at least a month.

Adwords, it’s time to step up and fix the platform that’s your bread and butter. Now.

What about you? What have you done when you’ve gotten the red bar of death? Has Adwords reached out to you individually? Are you noticing any patterns in when it happens? Share in the comments!

Related Posts:

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On a recent PPCChat, the PPC world scored a coup – an interview with an Adwords representative. This was something we’d been asking for for a long time, and the members of PPCChat waited with anticipation for the chance to ask Google some hard questions.

While I was ecstatic that our fearless PPCChat leader Matt Umbro was able to get Matt Lawson (ML) from Google onto the chat, I was less than ecstatic with the answers ML gave.

(Let me be clear – Matt Umbro did a stellar job preparing the questions for ML and managing the chat. He rocked the house as always!)

One of the first questions was whether we’d ever get a tablet bid modifier. Bing Ads is adding a tablet modifier later this year, so one might think that Google would wise up and do the same. Alas, no such luck. ML toed the party line and maintained that “Our data suggests tablet and desktop behavior are closely aligned, but if that changes we’ll revisit in the future.”

Well, I don’t know what data he’s looking at, but it ain’t the same data I’m looking at. I don’t have a single client who gets the same results from tablets as they do from desktops. Most of our clients see about 1 conversion from tablets for every 4 from desktop. I tweeted as much – and got more favorites on that tweet than I think I’ve gotten from any other tweet:

While I was (and am) frustrated by Google’s continued insistence that tablets and desktop are the same, I was excited for the rest of the chat. Sadly, it didn’t get better.

Matt asked “Do you believe AdWords will ever enter the account management market and charge like an agency would?” ML’s reply? “I don’t believe so. I have former agency folks on my team, so I know how complicated that world can be. We want to focus on delivering a great product, and expanding to include direct account management would distract from that.”

Well, this is just plain BS. Maybe Google isn’t charging for account management, but they’re definitely doing it. I have heard from several people whom I trust that Google has approached their clients asking to manage their accounts, and is actually doing so in some cases.

Lest I paint too negative a picture, not all of the chat was bad. ML indicated that Google might actually consider separate bids or modifiers for search partners: “We’re always balancing simplicity with control. We have such a large customer base that we often bias toward simplicity, but we get that there are always going to be sophisticates (like you PPCChatters) who want more control. Despite the fact that it’s unlikely to change soon, it’s a valid request and one which we will continue to evaluate.” While this comment validates my claim that Adwords has been dumbed down, it’s good to know that some type of control over search partners is at least still on the table.

In fact, ML said that Google pays attention to PPCChat, and that our feedback gets passed on to the powers that be at Adwords. I was encouraged by this news.

ML also liked the idea of creating an advisory council comprised of PPCChat members:

They’d be wise to do so – after all, Bing Ads has had an advisory council for a while, and they share news, updates, features, betas, and more with the group. Having an advisory council goes a long way toward creating client goodwill. I’d be happy to be a part of a Google council.

My overall takeaways from the chat were these:

• I’m happy that Google agreed to the chat. This is a huge step in the right direction.
• I’m also happy about the possibility of search partner bid modifiers. I’ve been begging for this for years.
• However, overall it felt like ML was just restating the Google party line. That was disappointing.
• Finally, I’m not sure he was totally honest – and I’m not the only one:

Did you follow the Adwords PPCChat? What did you think – was it great to hear from Google, or were you frustrated with the answers? Share in the comments!

Postscript: Minutes after I finished writing this post, Adwords announced they were getting rid of the option to not include close variants of keywords. This is yet another blow to PPC managers who want and need more control over their PPC traffic. I don’t think Google is listening, do you?

Related Posts:

• How The Google Ads RSA Changes Affect B2B PPC
• Trust Us. We’re Google.
• Learning Adwords Scripts
• Yes, Google Still Hates B2B Advertisers
• A/B Testing Is Alive and Well