In her article, Ginny Marvin says, at more than 15 years old, AdWords is looking like a bit of an old fogey, with an aging facade that looks to be creaking under the weight of hundreds of features accumulated over a decade and a half.
On Monday, the company announced the start of a major redesign process aimed at rejuvenating the AdWords interface. The last time Google touched up AdWords was way back in 2008.
It’s a major undertaking that aims at addressing a number of issues and wishes raised by advertisers. “This re-imagining process is going to take some time, but we’re excited to finally talk about what we’ve been working on for the past year, year and a half,” said Paul Feng, AdWords product management director, by phone last week. AdWords head Jerry Dischler hinted at this overhaul in a keynote discussion at SMX Advanced in Seattle last June, now we are getting the first glimpse at what’s in store.
“The reason we’re rebuilding AdWords is because the world has changed so much in the past two years. AdWords is now over 15 years old and launched when Google was just figuring out what search advertising was. We rebuilt it several years ago for a desktop world — smartphones were only [a] year old. Now we are in probably the biggest shift since AdWords was introduced (and I’d argue perhaps ever) with mobile,” said Feng, “And there is now increased demand on marketers and on AdWords as a platform — advertisers are running ads in search, display, shopping, mobile, video. Ultimately, that’s why we’re re-imagining AdWords.”
Feng said the redesign has been informed largely by talking to advertisers across the spectrum. Three common themes emerged. First, advertisers said it felt like AdWords has been built around products and features, rather than marketers’ needs and objectives. “How the navigation is laid out can be un-intuitive and comes with a high learning curve,” said Feng. Second, the platform has grown complex, with hundreds of features launching every year that stack up on each other. And third, the basic design looks and feels kind of dated. “The goal is to create a flexible platform for the future,” added Feng.
The redesign is based on Google’s design language, Material Design, that is used in many of its consumer products, like Gmail, Maps and Search.
We asked Feng what’s changing, what isn’t, and when we’re going to get to see this in real life.
Original Article http://searchengineland.com/adwords-redesign-first-look-246074
Original article by Ginny Marvin on searchengineland.com
