For all of Google’s commitment to giving their searchers a great experience, the same can’t be said for the AdWords interface, which just had a major overhaul.
After 17 years, and having a massive user base, a lot of data, lots of expert users who would be willing to give their thoughts, and hundreds of employees with PhDs… they still get many basic things wrong.
Take the Keyword Planner in AdWords, a tool that is used so much that Google recently stopped non-advertisers from accessing it. It is a pretty simple tool — enter keywords and see the searches performed each month for those keywords and related keywords.
Changing a keyword takes 5 clicks…
In the new version of Keyword Planner, to search for toothbrush I just type in “toothbrush”. Well, I have to hit enter to add the keyword, and then click the Get Started button (the button is far away from where I am typing). It used to work better when you separated keywords with commas and then hit enter — no need to touch the mouse.
I then see all the relevant keywords, and their search volume, sorted by relevance. Now if I want to search for electric toothbrush instead, I go back to the search box and click on the existing search keyword. The toothbrush keyword disappears and then reappears with an x next to it. I then click on the keyword again, and then click at the start of the keyword and type in electric, then hit the enter key and then click the search button. That’s three more clicks than achieving the same result in the old version.
I then want to only find keywords related to electric toothbrushes that have the word electric in them. So I click on the filter symbol on the far right (there’s another filter symbol on the left that looks exactly the same, that’ll confuse people for a while), and then I have options appearing back on the left, miles away from where I clicked. There are a bunch of choices but I’ve only ever used one (required keyword) and I figure most people have mostly used that one. A couple of clicks later I have added the filter.
Based on how people use this tool there should be a second box next to the search box where I can include/exclude keywords. Yes they are technically a filter, but I’m not a pedant programmer and I don’t want this option buried away with other filters.
It gets worse…
So I sort the results how I like, and scroll down to the bottom looking for suitable keywords, and then after 50 results click on the button to see the second page. And I’m still at the bottom. Most people would sort results how they like and then look at them in that order. So I tediously scroll back to the top of the page to carry on looking. In a regular Google search it would have taken me to the top of the second page, automatically. This tool should do the same. It’s a basic courtesy, and saves time and frustration.
So I make it to the third page and I’ve seen enough, so I enter a new search, with all the extra clicks that entails. The results are way lower than I expected (I have it sorted by number of searches). That’s because I’m on the third page of the new search results. There is nothing at the top of the page to indicate that I am on the third page. Obviously with a new search I want to start looking at the first page. Obviously!
These are basic things I discovered the first time I used the new version of the tool. I’d been putting it off because I knew how terrible the new AdWords interface is. Google know it too. Nobody wants to use it, and Google keep postponing forcing it upon us. If they had balls and decency, they would admit defeat.
Downloading the data…
When I download the report of my keywords, they aren’t in the order I had them. But I can’t just tell Excel to sort them, because there are two unnecessary lines of data above the column headers, telling me what the report is and when I ran it, which I have to delete. I guarantee it annoys everyone who does this. And they have added in a currency column, even though an account can only have one currency.
That’s 6 things that are annoying everyone who uses the tool on a regular basis.
NOTE: This is an integral part of the most successful, most profitable, self-service software tool in history.
