I consider myself to be all about change (even before Barack Obama) and feel like if I don’t shake things up in my life every few months then things will get boring. So, you would think when I found out about the new AdWords interface that I would be one of the first on board, but I’m not. I can’t figure out exactly why I’ve resisted using the new interface, but I know part of the reason is because I’m so used to the old interface when I’m not working in the Desktop Editor. This week I finally buckled down and faced this change head on and decided to start using the new interface with a couple of my accounts, after all we are all going to be forced to use this new interface soon.

The new interface looks like the Desktop Editor in terms of navigation. There is a navigational tree along the left that allows you to quickly jump from ad group to ad group and campaign to campaign. In my opinion this is a big improvement over the old interface because the most time consuming thing was moving throughout a large account and waiting for pages to load. Anther big change in the new interface is the addition of graphs that look a lot like Google Analytics graphs. This should make it easier to identify trends in your AdWords accounts where with the old interface you had to either generate reports look at the change history or look at Analytics data to identify long term trends. I imagine these graphs could be very useful for monitoring accounts, but I haven’t found anything interesting yet. Another change that I like is that you can actually edit keywords, previously if you wanted to change a keyword’s matching or spelling you were forced to delete the term and add the changed term back to the account.

So you might think, wow there’s a bunch of new useful features, I should switch to the new interface right away, but not so fast. One of my biggest gripes is how much information is crammed into the new interface window. I have a fairly large monitor (1680×1050 resolution) and I noticed that I needed to have my Firefox window taking up most of the screen in order to see all the information within the new interface. So, I decided to set my screen resolution 1024×768 (which is what a lot of internet users have) and my hunch was correct that it is terrible to navigate throughout the new interface unless you like scrolling left and right as well as up and down. Another big issue I have is just moving around the new interface is choppy and overall pretty sloppy. The new interface is beta like most Google roll outs, but from what I hear they are switching to this new interface in the next few months, so I hope these issues are fixed before the launch. Maybe it’s because I’m using Firefox and on a Mac but even so I don’t think this is ready for prime-time. Overall it has some good new features, but I am not sold yet. Has anyone else used the new interface? I’m interested to know what other people think.