What Happened to the Google AdWords “Previous Interface” option?

June 23, 2010

Collective Measures
Why we're lamenting the phasing out of the old keyword research tool on Google AdWords. Plus a few back doors to the old tool.

When Google came out for a visit last month we got hints that they might be ready to kill the "previous interface" option for finding new keywords in Google AdWords. And today (tonight we think) it seems that they did finally. There is a hint of a new backend that might be better called "nostradamo" that is linked from the new keyword interface, but it’s broken right now. 

Why I liked the old version better.

  • I was used to it. (lame I know, but still)
  • Less broad. Now I enter a keyword and I get a huge amount of synonyms and I have to go in and uncheck the categories. 
  • Automatic. Hear me out here. So in the old version if you didn’t add anything into the box if would automatically give suggestions on anything that was in your ad group already. SO you could enter some placeholders in Google AdWords Editor, post them, then look for suggestions. Seems like not a big deal, but it saved time, and it felt like a lot of time. If the new interface had this one option, I think I would like it more. 
  • This is a big one: "Don’t show me suggestions for other keywords." This allowed you to quickly get estimated monthly searches for your previously chosen keywords. So we would settle on a set of keywords to recommend to clients, and would then want to go get number of search estimates. 

There are some things I do like: The ability to drop different keywords into different ad groups. That’s nice. 

And of course this comes at a bad time. There are three of us tonight working on deadlines, and we’re all sending sad and frustrated IM’s back and forth about it. You can still access the open version that isn’t tied to your account. But that means that you can’t save them into the ad group. Also the keyword tool in Editor is still working, but that works only 1 keyword at a time. 

So my plea to Google: PLEASE bring back the previous interface. 

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