The Google Ads interface consists of tabs across the top, the first one being search, reports, tools & settings. In the top right-hand corner you’ll have a help icon, and the notifications link (the bell).
If you click on Overview a dashboard all of the various stats within your account will be shown. If your account is a new one, or you have limited access, you will have no statistics in this part of Google Ads.
If you click the campaigns icon, this will show you a list of all the campaigns in your account. You can click on these campaigns to see the stats or the performance of this campaign or scroll down within Google Ads.
There is also a way to hide this column by clicking on the arrow next to “all online campaigns”. This is helpful to people that don’t have a large monitor. If you’re dealing with many campaigns you can also search for a particular campaign in the search bar above.
Underneath the campaigns on the left-hand side there are four different options starting with, shared library, bulk operations, reports and labels.
Shared library allows you to see audiences, business strategies, budgets, business data, campaign negative keywords, campaign placement exclusions, and URL options.
Audiences is where you keep your remarketing lists. Remarketing will be talked about in a future chapter, but this is where you will create the lists to remarket to.
Bid strategies is where you can create particular strategies which allow you to manage bids for the keywords in your campaigns.
The budgets section will allow you to create budgets and share them across various campaigns this can be useful if dealing with multiple campaigns, where the account itself should not spend over a particular amount per day, you will also state the bidding method (how you want the budget to be spent).
The business data section allows you to upload information about your products that you can reference in your ads.
This can be useful when you have many products and you don’t have the time to create text ads for each one of them, you can reference a feed which inputs the correct information e.g. count down to a particular date or a limited amount of products available which updates automatically.
The campaign negative keywords section allows you to add multiple negative keywords to many campaigns at the same time. This is useful if you have a list that you would like to add and don’t want to spend the time adding them to each campaign.
Negative keywords are a very important part of Google Ads and we will talk about them in a future chapter.
Campaign placement exclusions does a similar thing, but it is a list of websites that you do not want to place your ads on, this only applies to display campaigns.
URL options allows you to place code at the end of your URL to get more advanced tracking and it is most likely reserved for the websites which get a large amount of traffic.
The bulk operations link leads you to automated rules, scripts, bulk edits, and bulk uploads.
Automated rules allows you to tell Google Ads if certain criteria is met, a particular action should be taken.
Scripts is a section within Google Ads that you can create or paste code (JavaScript) which runs as often as you choose and it is very frequently used for reporting (the Information that the script obtains is then exported to an external Excel spreadsheet).
Bulk edits is for those that want to change their campaign by editing multiple things at a time. An example might be instead of changing the bid of one keyword, you can change the bid of thousands of keywords by executing one function.
Bulk uploads allows you to upload a file such as a new campaign with ad groups, keywords and ad copy all at once instead of creating all of these things one at a time. Bulk edits and bulk uploads are more efficiently done in Google Ads editor, but this is spoken about in a future chapter.
The reports tab is a list of all the reports you have scheduled, which can email information to you that you request on a regular basis.
This is very useful if you don’t want to have to to login to Google Ads on a regular basis and want this information sent you on a regular basis. This can also be useful if someone within your company has requested information each day, week or month and does not know how to use Google Ads very well.
Labels allows you to group particular pieces of information (Campaigns, ad groups, ads or keywords) so that you can see how they perform. A good example might be if you create new ad copy and want to see how it performs versus existing ad copy. You might label the new ad copy and the old ad copy and you’ll be able to see at a glance which one is performing best.
You can select different parts of Google Ads in the tabs above titled Campaigns, Ad groups, Settings, Dimensions, and Display Network.
These tabs will allow you to navigate Google Ads. The opportunities link will populate with ideas once your campaign has been running for a while. Google Ads will suggest improvements to the account, These suggestions can come in the form of budget changes, additional keywords, ad copy changes, and bid changes. The opportunities tab can be very good but it can also suggest keywords which are not relevant so when implementing suggestions from opportunities, be sure to check everything thoroughly as they will not always be relevant to your campaign.
The tools link will give you access to the change history, where you can see each update which has been made to your Google Ads account (this is useful if you have made a change to your campaign that you would like to reverse or a significant increase or decrease in the performance that you would like to track back to a particular change).
Conversions – this will allow you to see the actions that you have decided to record, This may include phone calls to your business, sales on your website, or enquiries that have been made.
Attribution – this will allow you to see visitor behaviour which has led to a conversion, an example of this might be the time difference between a click to your website and an enquiry.
A link to Google analytics which is a free program from Google and it is designed to record the activity on your website (a very useful tool for you to improve your campaign) and highly recommended.
Google merchant centre (soon to be called Google base), which is needed for Google shopping campaigns and Dynamic Remarketing and is often used for e-commerce websites.
The keyword planner which allows you to do research on the best keywords for your campaign and what you might pay to bid on them.
The display planner – which is used to do research if you are implementing a Google display network campaign which allows you to replace banner ads or text ads on the various websites throughout the Internet.
At preview and diagnosis allows you to see if your ad is showing on google search. This is recommended by Google so that you are not inflating the amount of impressions your ad receives by searching on google itself to see if your ad is showing. This can lower the click through rate and increase the amount you pay for the visits to your website, it will also give you reasons as to why your ad is not showing.
The gear icon as spoken about previously, contains the settings of your account, But it also contains the help section this is very helpful as Google has a dedicated team of Google Ads specialists who can help you if you are stuck on a particular problem, you can read more about this at this link.
Although this information is meant to give you an idea about the various features within Google Ads, some of these features are rarely used or are reserved for Advanced users, so although we have covered them briefly today if you are feeling a little nervous about dealing with stuff like JavaScript (!), there is no need as we will cover them thoroughly in later chapters and as stated a lot of these tabs are used much more than others. This is simply the first part of the Google Ads guide or an overview of the interface.
To go to the next chapter on the campaigns tab, click here.