Being scared of change is normal. Change is scary. It looks like Google's latest objective was to frighten the life out of us with the new AdWords Interface (now known as Google Ads after last month's change over). But there is a reason they tell you to face your fears, as the new interface while initially daunting, actually comes accompanied with a plethora of useful features:

Overview Dashboards

Right from the get go Google throws some useful (and aptly colourful) tools in your face. These visual representations give you instant insights into various useful metrics about your account. From well preforming keywords and device split performance to heatmaps of your day/hour performance over the past 7 days.  These dashboards provide quick insights into trending performance to make preforming optimisations become a much more seamless process.

Recommendations

Speaking of optimisations, Google has now provided a whole page full of recommended optimisations that can be automatically implemented at the click of button. These are based on a campaigns performance compared to its goals, from there google identifies categories such as bids and budgets, keywords and targeting, ads and extensions etc. from which your account could benefit. They can be broken down to the campaign level for when you need a more granular focus.

As always, take these suggestions with a grain of salt as Google is in the business of making money off of you, however when you're frequently staring at the same screens everyday it's easy to overlook something so Google acting as another pair of eyes to recommend some changes could give your account the small boost you've been looking for.

Recently they implemented a nice little score which acts as a ranking for the "health" of your account. Great for a little friendly competition between you and your PPC buddies.

  Audience Insights

Perhaps my favourite part of the new interface is the Audience Insights page. I'm sure we're all glaringly aware of how important targeting the right audience is. Previously we had to preform manual analysis on these and create the graphs you see below ourselves. Well my friends the future really is now. Google now takes all the information in your account and provides you with broken down insights for gender, Age, Parental Status, Location and Device from any of your current audiences.

Then if they hadn't already treated you enough, below this they include potential In-Market 7 Affinity Audiences to add to your campaigns. What I find most interesting about this is that they include some audiences you may never even have heard thought of, but actually contain a large chunk of your converting user base, showing you how much more likely one the individuals within those audiences are likely to be contained in your list of converters.