It’s old news that Google Adwords has gotten a new look. I signed up to try the new look a while ago, and I’ve got to admit it makes it easier to set up campaigns and manage my accounts. You can also set up your local campaigns and target a certain demographics on Google easily with this new interface. I also like the fact that you get to manage your impressions on the content network easily using the interface.

Google has gone out of its way to create a smarter interface to help newbies set up Adwords campaigns fast. After all, if you help people spend money on your network, you are going to make more money in the process as well.

Even the process of research keywords and setting up adgroups has gotten easier. The concept of inheritance has been introduced to the interface to make easy to create similar adgroups fast.

Overall, I like the new interface a lot. I do object to Google setting the default options in a way to extract more money from advertisers but Google is out there to make a profit. What you want to do is make sure you change the default settings in a way that saves you money and gains more exposure for your business. The new interface may take some time getting used to but it’s certainly more exciting than the old interface.

Your take: what do you like/dislike about Adwords’ new interface?

One of the biggest mistakes that newbie marketers make with adwords, and other paid search services is targeting everything under the sun in one adgroup. Let’s say I want to promote a coupon site. If you use a keyword tool, such as WordTracker, you can get thousands of keywords that are related and not related to coupons.

By putting everything under the sun in one adgroup and using the same ads and landing pages for all these keywords, you are not only going to hurt your pocket (as your quality score will drop for unrelated keywords), you are not going to realize a high enough CTR and conversions from your campaigns. That’s why you should limit what you put in each of your adgroup.

The best way you can optimize adgroups is by targeting only one keyword in each group. But here is the thing. Most pay per click services limit the number of adgroups and campaigns you can have, which means you may not be able to use the one-keyword-per-adgroup concept for your adwords campaigns. I personally use the concept of “mini-themes” for my adgroups. But you should avoid putting bargain keywords in a coupon adgroup. You should also have different landing pages for different keywords. Research has shown that if you customize landing pages for specific keywords, you are going to see better conversion results.

There is no magic number that you can use here, but you should always follow this rule: never put completely different keyword phrases in one adgroup (by that I mean keyword phrases that are mutually exclusive). It’s very simple but you’d be amazed how many folks don’t do it.