We have a winner: announcing the results of our test of new Ads designs

On March 2, 2023, inspired by a wealth of feedback on Ads’ navigation and overall ease of use, we announced that we were testing new Google Ads designs. The test included two designs that reorganized pages into more thematically linked groups, enabling you to do everything you do in Ads today, just more quickly and easily.

And now, we have a winner: the new Ads design with a main menu on the left of the screen, with pages organized into 5 high-level categories: 

1. Campaigns: where you analyze, optimize, and manage your campaigns
2. Goals: where you define, monitor, and update your conversion goals
3. Tools: where you can find tools for: 
   1. Planning
   2. Bidding and budgets
   3. Troubleshooting
   4. And more
4. Billing: where you monitor your spend and payments
5. Admin: where you manage your team, security, and account settings

This extra level of categorization helped make this new design more effective for both new and experienced advertisers.

 

So, if you signed in to Ads today to discover a slightly different menu design—this is why. With the winner identified, we’re moving everyone in the experiment over to this design. If you’re not using the new design yet, you can expect to be welcomed in sometime before the end of the year (though you’ll be able to switch to the previous design as needed during the holiday season).

Of course, based on what we’re hearing from you, there’s still work to be done.

What we’re learning from your feedback

While we learn more about how you use the new design every day, several themes are prominent: 

1. Change takes time. When switching between the new and previous designs, you often say you don’t have time to get used to the new design. We get it! You have a lot to do, and only so much time to do it—it’s one reason you’ll continue to have the option to switch between the previous and new designs until 2024.
2. Some workflows need work. We’ve also heard loud and clear how important the search terms report is to your keyword management. So we’re looking closely at how to better connect that workflow across pages. Similarly, we’re looking at the discoverability of campaign settings.
3. The menus take up space. We understand you need ample screen real estate to take in and act on your data, and the navigation takes up some of that space. This is in part due to the increased font size and spacing around navigation items, which we need to ensure accessibility for all our advertisers. But we’re investigating other solutions, like increasing the responsiveness of the menus on smaller screens, and giving you more direct control over spacing, like you have in Gmail. If you need more space now, you can click the hamburger icon () to collapse the menu.

 

Here’s how the hamburger icon can give you a little screen space back. 

What’s next

Stay tuned for future notifications within Ads as we continue rolling out the winning new design. We’ll be updating Help Center documentation and creating additional resources to help you get comfortable with — and even more efficient in — the new design. In the meantime, our quick reference map in the Help Center can help you find key pages. 

And don’t forget to keep sharing your feedback from the “Leave feedback” option in the Help menu, or when you switch between designs. Your input is the best tool we have to build a better Google Ads for you. As a reminder, you will be able to switch back to the previous design until 2024.

Posted by Dianna Wu, Product Manager, Google Ads