New Interface Thursdays: Tailor your account with customizable columns

Today on New Interface Thursdays we'll be taking a look at customizable columns. Customizable columns are one of the ways that new AdWords interface helps you manage your campaigns more effectively. With customizable columns, you can select which metrics are most important to your business, and then quickly view those metrics in your campaigns.

To get started, click on the Filter and views button in your account and select Customize columns.

From there you'll see a variety of columns that you can add or remove from your account.

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On the left hand side you'll see that the metrics are broken into two groups: Performance and Conv., which is short for Conversions. Keep in mind that you'll only see conversion columns if you've enabled AdWords Conversion Tracking in your AdWords account. You can select all the columns in a category by checking the box next to the category name.

While on the topic of conversion columns, let's go over the new conversion metrics. Last month, we announced an update to how AdWords reports conversions. Now, you can choose to see columns for many-per-click, 1-per-click conversions, or both. To get a better understanding of the new metrics you can read this article.

Getting back to the Customized Columns panel, let's take a look at the right side of the box, the Preview section. You'll notice some columns are gray and others are green. The gray columns are fixed, so they're always shown. The green columns are metrics you've selected to be shown. You can rearrange the order of these metrics by clicking and dragging them. This is great for setting up a side-by-side comparison for metrics like average cost-per-click and average position, for example.

One last thing to keep in mind is that columns vary across the different tabs in AdWords, depending on the metrics presented within each tab. For instance, you'll find a Quality Score column in the Keywords tab, but not in the Campaigns tab.

That's it for customizable columns. We hope you'll give this feature a try so that you can tailor your account and see only the information you want.

Posted by Emel Mutlu, Inside AdWords crew