Adwords Editor - Half a job done?

Google released an upgrade to their Adwords Editor recently and whilst some of the changes are welcomed I can’t help thinking that the job has been left unfinished. It suggests to me that the Editor has a limited life now and that they hope we will all use their new interface instead.

For those who are unfamiliar with the Editor, it is free software from Google that you install onto your PC. With it you can download your campaigns, make changes and upload again.

It has been a blessing to Adwords Professionals like me because it allowed you to make lots of changes faster.
Google’s aim with their new interface was to make life easier for people and speed up the process of making changes to your account. I suspect they expected that the Adwords Editor would become redundant and maybe that’s why it has been overlooked for a while now.

However, they have now released a new version and they have addressed some of the issues that needed to be address.

For example, you can now set up location targeting in the editor. Albeit somewhat basic it is certainly better than the old method of creating a campaign in the Editor, uploading it and then making sure you remembered to add the location targeting elements through the online interface.

What I find frustrating though is the opportunity missed.

You see a lot of the fields in the Editor have different names for the setting than they do in the new Interface. For example: in the new interface they now use the word Eligible for the Status field. The Editor still uses the status of Active.

You might think I’m being picky but to me it clearly points to a lack of care (or maybe interest) in the product. Even in their release notes they state that they have updated some of the field to make them consistent with the new interface. That shows that they deliberately decided not to update all the fields. Why?

OK. Rant over. I’ll just go back to mentally translating what each field means in the Editor. I’m a long way from giving that software up and moving completely online. The new interface may have some wonderful features but it is still TOO SLOW!