About a month ago, I highlighted some new changes happening with Google AdWords.

If you haven’t logged into your AdWords account for a while, you should probably go check out the changes. You’ll also be welcomed with a new interface (still currently in beta, but officially rolling out soon).

So, what do we think of all of these recent updates to AdWords? Here are what we consider the main wins and losses of the new platform.

New AdWords Interface: Win

The more streamlined look of the new AdWords interface gives us a rejuvenated vigor to dive even deeper into our clients’ accounts.

It still takes awhile to find where some features have moved, so I love that you can still toggle back and forth to the old AdWords look if you need to.

A favorite new feature of mine is expanded targeting, including household income targeting. This is great for anyone targeting higher income levels with things like expensive cars (hint, hint to our luxury auto dealers).

Daily Budget Spending: Loss (for the Most Part)

We weren’t ready for this change, and we still aren’t fans of the daily budget spending.

If you aren’t familiar with this new option, AdWords can now spend up to double your daily budget to potentially make up for days that didn’t hit the budget.

If you are running only one campaign in your account, this option will make your life easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy. But if you’re running more than one campaign? Watch your campaign budgets even closer than before.

We’ve noticed that if you are consistently hitting your 20% budget overage for the day, Google won’t spend more than that. But if you have a roller coaster of ad spend each month, you’ll need to be checking your spend more often, which can be slightly stressful.

Ad Suggestions: Win

Notifications for the new ad suggestions feature started popping up in October, with roll-out dates coming throughout November.

We’re a few weeks into the month and have seen only two suggestions come through in our accounts (from the more than 2,000 ads we’ve previously created).

Ad suggestions still sound like a great idea, and we appreciate the notification bell alerting us if any suggestions were made. We’re ready for this feature to roll out more fully to see if it will result in better user engagement.

Call-Only Extensions: Win

Call-only extensions debuted quietly. Ironically, ad extensions aren’t quiet. They’re pretty awesome about shouting out a few extra great things your business offers.

After taking a quick delve into our call extension stats so far, we’ve noticed the performance to be very similar to other search ad extensions within the same account.

Ad Rotation: Win (if You Use It Right!)

We haven’t worked with Google’s option to evenly rotate ads before, so I can’t tell you what it looked like previously.

That said, the new ability to optimize your ad rotation to show only the best-performing ads is a huge bonus for better consumer actions.

If your ads are still rotating evenly, we highly suggest a change in your strategy so you can find the best-performing ads and capitalize on those unicorns.

Get Smarter with Google AdWords

If you can’t devote enough time to your AdWords campaigns — or you aren’t yet advertising with Google at all — why not outsource to people invested in growing your business through search engine marketing?

Click below to check out what 9 Clouds can do for you.