Retargeter

A Crash Course in AdWords Enhanced Campaigns

Google recently rolled out a new initiative for AdWords called Enhanced Campaigns. Providing you with the ability to manage bids across devices, locations, and time of day (a first for paid search campaigns), this is definitely a feature you’ll want to take advantage of.

Here’s a crash course in Enhanced Campaigns:

Key Features:

Multi-Device Bidding

In the past, Google AdWords required that you create and manage separate campaigns for bids based on time, location, and device. With Enhanced Campaigns, you can increase or decrease bids based on time, location, or device — all within a single campaign. This gives you the ability to adjust bids with more granularity much more easily and efficiently, letting you place your ads in front of the right audience without managing several distinct campaigns.

Smart Ads

This aptly named feature ensures your ads show the copy, site links, or extensions most appropriate for the user. For example, if a user in San Francisco searches for coffee shops from their iPhone, the Smart Ads feature would know to serve a mobile ad for a coffee shop with a phone number. Similarly, if that same user searches for coffee shops from their desktop, they’ll see an ad related to past browsing history, with full extensions.

In the past, in order to accomplish this type of relevance and personalization, multiple campaigns or ad groups would have to be set up. For the companies with a website, physical location, phone number, and newsletter, setting up appropriate campaigns was a tedious task. Smart Ads greatly alleviate much of this headache and increase the relevance of your ads.

Advanced Reporting

Google is slowly rolling out more conversion options to optimize your reporting within AdWords. Most recently, they announced the ability to record calls over 60 seconds long as a conversion. In the coming months, Google will unveil in-store conversions, digital downloads, and cross-device conversions. This data will greatly enhance a marketer’s ability to run more tests and better understand which of their ads is working.

Extension Management

Previously, AdWords ad extensions had to be set at the campaign level. With Enhanced Campaigns, however, Extensions can be set at the Ad Group level, to a specific set of keywords. This new feature enables you to serve the extension that is most in line with what a user has searched for. In addition, you can review the performance of each individual site link as opposed to the block of site links AdWords currently lets you review.

As you can see, Enhanced Campaigns certainly live up to their name. The new initiative contains numerous features that will allow SMB’s to create highly optimized campaigns, especially for mobile, very easily. There are components of this new initiative, however, that aren’t all positive for marketers.

Downside to Enhanced Campaigns:

Enhanced Campaigns forces you to combine tablet and desktop campaigns. Previously, marketers could set-up campaigns with either tablet traffic or desktop traffic in mind, and plan accordingly. Now, you must treat these two very different traffic segments as one. In addition to being time-consuming, this will affect your ability to be as granular as you could in the past. In order to avoid poor campaign performance, the tablet experience will have to be optimized. Additionally, not all conversion types are supported on tablets. For example, if you have a conversion set as a file download, this action isn’t possible on all tablet devices. This will result in advertisers paying for a click that will have a 0% conversion rate.

Currently, Google controls 98% of the U.S. mobile search market and 96% of mobile search advertising worldwide. In forcing Enhanced Campaigns upon advertisers, Google is positioned to capture the final 2% of the market — a thought for advertisers everywhere to digest.