Who remembers April 22, 2014 when Google hosted a livestream forum titled #StepIntoAdwords on upcoming enterprise level features that would be added to Adwords?

Of the announcements, most SEMs were most excited about the promise of customizable multidimensional reports and data visualization tools.

Only a week later, excited about the potential, some started questioning when exactly these new features would be arriving…

Now, almost exactly 1 year later, it appears that this reporting revamp is finally rolling out to accounts.

The “Reports” area, formerly on the left sidebar, now appears on the top navigation. Clicking in, there are a handful of pre-defined reports and the ability to create your own custom report from scratch. These reports introduce brand-new UI capabilities.

Some of the most exciting features (so far) to me are:

• The ability to create on the fly visual charts (line, bar and pie)
  
• Drag and drop data segments which are very fast
• The ability to filter on any data point. For instance, in the past when you use a “segment” in an Adwords report, like a device segment, you can’t filter on the segment itself so you’d have to pull data into excel to see something like the mobile spend month over month.
• The ability to see data on an “account” level. Formerly, reporting segments at the highest level showed the data on a campaign level so required pivoting in excel to see account level data on most reporting. Now, it’s easy to see metrics on an account wide level.
  
• There are totally new ways of looking at data quickly. Want to see how much you spent on exact match keywords month over month?  Formerly this would take multiple steps in excel. Now you just have to pull in the “match type”, “cost” and “month” columns and filter your match type for exact.  It’s done in a matter of seconds.
  
• Formerly inaccessible data such as “Conversion Name” by keyword or ad. Formerly, certain reporting was only available to a certain depth. For instance, “Custom Columns” recently gave the ability to see each of your conversions in their own columns, but only at the campaign or ad group level. Now, you can see what keywords produced leads vs newsletter sign-ups and if you want that even further broken down to device, you can do that too!
• Ability to save any report you build in one place and access it for whatever timeline you like. Adwords formerly had some ability to do this but it required lots of hopping around the UI to the place that your preferred data “lives”. Then you had to pull down your saved column settings and filters. Alternately, if you saved a report in the reporting section, you had to “recreate” it with a new date range to see new trends in the data.  Now all saved reports will be in one area where you can quickly access them in a single click,  toggle between them and update the date ranges “on the fly”
  

Those familiar with Google Analytics custom reporting will see many similarities in this reporting particularly in the drop and drop UI abilities. That said, these new AdWords features are more robust in many ways; most notably that you don’t build a report and then save it to see the data, instead the data appears in real time as you are building the report.

Google reports that this new feature dubbed the “Report Editor” will be rolling out to all accounts in April and May. More information on the capabilities of the Report Editor can be found here. https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6191545