A new year means a new start, out with the old, in with the old. For Google, it meant pushing out incremental changes and initiatives.

There was a shift in their focus towards machine learning and the role of artificial intelligence in search. Their systems have made significant strides to better understand exactly what people are looking for when they punch in a search query.

These changes have been in the works for some time but what stood out the most to me in 2017 was the new Adwords user interface (UI).  It took some time to get familiar with the layout but the new interface definitely looks much cooler and offers features that weren’t available before.  You can still navigate back and forth between the two interfaces but the new interface will eventually become the default interface sometime in 2018.   Despite going back and forth between the two from time to time, I give the new UI a ‘Like’.

What I like most is the cleaner navigation with a more intuitive design in the left-hand navigation pane.  It feels much easier to find what you’re looking for instead of having to go through multiple tabs.  Another great feature that I’ve quickly adopted is the new dashboard, a high-level view of key data you want to see, all in one place…Whaaaat?

It’s going to be an exciting year and we can’t wait to see what surprises Google has in store for 2018.