Google AdWords Clicks Changes to Interactions

Posted 28-10-2015 by James

On Wednesday the 2nd September AdWords announced that they were changing the name of three reporting columns within the AdWords interface:

  • Clicks will become Interactions
  • Click-through rate will become Interaction rate
  • Avg. Cost per click will become Avg. Cost

Why are they doing this?

Preceding this update, Google moved the hard-to-find “Video Campaigns” section into the main AdWords interface to make managing multi-channel clients easier, (just to recap, there are 4 channels that can be run through AdWords: Search, Shopping, Display, TrueView) as TrueView used to sit in its own silo which made managing any TrueView/Video campaign slightly annoying. With the 4 channels now sitting within the same interface the term “click” does not match the main reporting metric of all channels as TrueView campaigns are measured by views and the other 3 by clicks. So the “click” column has been renamed “interactions” to allow for this change. The relevant interaction (namely a click, engagement or view) is specified in the column itself, meaning your AdWords interface will now look something like this: jablog1

Are there any negative impacts from this change?

Not per se, just some things to be aware of:

  • The column “click” no longer really exists so bear this in mind when looking in your AdWords Interface and downloading reports as you will need the “interactions” column instead. Same goes for what used to be Click-through rate (CTR) and Average cost-per-click (Avg. CPC).
  • When you download a report into excel, the specified interaction will still be there so you will need to delete the text in order for pivot tables to work.

jamesblog2

What are the benefits?

Thankfully these do outweigh the small negatives:

  • You can manage all AdWords channels in one place
  • More accurate reporting is now available in the AdWords interface
  • TrueView is much easier to run now

Any thoughts for the future?

It paves the way for AdWords to run and be able to report accurately on more channels, for example the newly announced native ads in Gmail and the newly announce Universal App Campaigns. As ever there is undeniable logic to the changes Google AdWords makes it looks to this writer that Google is laying the foundation work for more channel launches - so watch this space! Follow my contributions to the blog to find out more about paid search or sign up to the ThoughtShift Guest List, our monthly email, to keep up-to-date on all our blogposts, guides and events.