Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns - Are You Ready?

Google has announced a new type of AdWords campaign, called Enhanced Campaigns, which streamlines the targeting of ads to people using different devices. When you create a new Enhanced Campaign the management of the campaign will be streamlined as AdWords will automatically help you target the best ad to particular devices.

This means that you will no longer have to create dedicated mobile, tablet and desktop campaigns. Instead one campaign will automatically display appropriate ads to each type of device. Enhanced Campaigns will also help in presenting the most appropriate ad extensions based on the device someone is using to view your ad.

For example, if you have a text based ad targeted to Google search, along with multiple ad extensions, then AdWords will automatically select the best ad extension to display along with your ad. Someone searching on their mobile device might be presented with your click-to-call number, while someone searching on their desktop will see additional links (sitelinks) along with your ad variation.

The benefit of Enhanced Campaigns is that they really will help reduce account management time by reducing duplication that is currently used to achieve more targeted results.

What we love about Enhanced Campaigns:

• Location bids allow you to adjust your bids based on someone's proximity to your location
• Time bids allow you to increase bids when your business is open and decrease bids when your business is closed
• Device bids allow you to adjust bids up and down by a percentage for mobile devices
• Custom bidding combinations allow you to make bid adjustments based on multiple criteria, including location, time and device
• Advanced reporting metrics allow you to see how the different versions of each individual ad have performed in greater detail, including individual sitelinks, allowing for improved campaign optimisation
• New conversion types including the option to track phone calls and digital downloads
• Specify sitelinks for mobile devices allows you to better control messaging and calls-to-action for mobile device users
• Extension scheduling allows you to choose when to display particular ad extensions along with your ad variations
• Ad group extensions allows you to create extensions at the ad group level, instead of just the campaign level

What might suck about Enhanced Campaigns:

• One set of keywords for multiple devices will mean that you won’t have the option of using separate keywords for mobile devices, so more generic keywords might creep into your account
• No bid adjustment for tablet devices will remove the ability to modify bids for users on tablet devices
• Streamlined management will also be a negative for people who prefer granular management of targeting and keyword-level bidding

We hope that Google will add some more granular controls to Enhanced Campaigns during their launch and we are also keen to see how the advanced reporting metrics are going to be integrated into Google Analytics for more in-depth analysis and optimisation opportunities.

Enhanced Campaigns will begin rolling out to AdWords accounts this month and Google has flagged that all campaigns will be upgraded by the middle of the year. If you are currently managing AdWords campaigns then it is worth taking some time to start planning your account migration and document your existing account structure, especially if you have separate desktop, tablet and mobile campaigns.