Enhanced Adwords Campaigns – First Impressions

Are you reading this post on your smartphone or tablet? It’s been suggested that mobile devices will outnumber desktop devices by the end of this year. As online advertisers and PPC managers this is something we need to pay close attention to. The way people are searching for things online has vastly changed in the last five years. One way Google Ad Words has responded to this change is by introducing Enhanced Campaigns. Google tells us that enhanced campaigns will make it much easier for us to optimize for mobile devices, reach more customers with fewer changes, and thus increase our Return On Investment (ROI). I’m both excited and perhaps a bit weary about how much this will change the way I design my ad campaigns.

There is going to be a lot of learning in the next couple months. Luckily Google is giving weekly webinars which will dig a little deeper into the new features, and hopefully start to answer everyone’s questions before we all have to take that big leap into enhanced campaigns. Today’s Google webinar went into more detail about bid adjustments, and why (hopefully) enhanced campaigns are going to make all of our lives a little easier. Below I will break down some of the key highlights about what stood out for me on the “Enhanced Campaigns Series 201: Device bid adjustments and smarter mobile ads webcast”

My first impression is that enhanced campaigns will be a time saver. Now instead of creating separate campaigns for mobile devices versus desktops so that you can allocate different budgets to each, depending on your ROI goals, everything can now be done in one campaign. Enhanced campaigns lets you add a certain percentage of your base bid, say $10, to either time, location, or device. So if you’ve seen a better ROI from people searching for your product on their phones at a certain time of day, or within a certain area, you can increase your bid by a certain percentage, say 50%, for those factors to make your ad and products more visible. So your bid for your more desirable factors would be $15, instead of the base bid of $10.

It’s also important to note that even though every thing is now contained in one campaign, we will still be able to create ads targeted just to mobile devices. This allows us to change the headline, the URL, the sitelinks, and the description to be better optimized for people searching on their mobile device.

We also need to keep in mind that looking at the ROI on mobile reports is different than looking at reports on desktop devices. We have to remember to keep in mind that it’s important to account for all mobile conversions, including purchases made on a mobile or tablet site, app downloads or purchases in apps, and cross-device research, such as beginning their search for a product on their mobile, and then moving to their desktop to complete a purchase.

So the four big bidding changes happening with enhanced campaigns are:

• Campaigns will run across all devices
• Mobile bids will be adjusted at the the campaign level
•  Tablet bidding strategies will be aligned with desktop
•  Mobile bids are fully controlled by advertisers.

It will be interesting to see how the transition goes over the next few months, and I am excited to see the improved changes Google promises enhanced campaigns will bring to our PPC clients. If anyone out there has already made the plunge into enhanced campaigns, I’d love to hear your feedback!