Revamped Adwords MCC Dashboard – Finally!

Innovations / May 27, 2008

After experiencing a few hickups with our AdWords access this morning, when I was able to log back in, I was pleasantly surprised to see that Google has started rolling out an updated version of the MCC (My Client Center) Dashboard. So far, I like what I see. Especially that they’ve updated it with features that we and other search marketers have been requesting for the last little while – nice job Google!

The MCC Dashboard centralizes and makes it easy for people managing multiple AdWords accounts by providing high level account statistics for each account. The old dashboard included mostly budget data with the possibility of changing date ranges but these were set to predifined ranges.

What’s new?

Google has added a new performance tab to complement the already existing budget section, providing a much more comprehensive overview of each account. Most importantly, the date range feature has been updated to allow for flexible date selection as well as defined ranges (including the option to view today’s data which wasn’t available before!)

On the new performance page, we can now see clicks, impressions, conversions, conversion rate, as well as separate Search and Content network CTR. On the Budget page, we continue to find start- and end- dates, percent of budget spent and total spend. The AdWords help section seems to have been updated.

What’s missing?

Although the new performance data is a big improvement, we’d love the ability to customize the data columns to display. It would seem trivial but useful to add a Cost per Conversion column. In addition, we’d like the possibility to view other types of conversions as well as such as sales, sign-ups, and also conversion value (specifically useful with eComm campaigns). This may pose a bit of complexity since it creates an account specific requirement rather then uniforming the data to display across all accounts. One idea would be data view preferences which you can associate to multiple clients (lead generating, sales, signups, etc).

So far, so good!

We were looking for an official announcement from Google but it looks like they may be slowly rolling this new dashboard and collecting feedback from MCC account holders for now (there’s a feedback link at the bottom of the MCC page that refers to MCC_V2). Any one else seeing the new dashboard – if so, since when and what do you think?