By Helen Brown
Any advertiser who wanted to target a variety of devices or locations with their AdWords advertising would have needed to create separate campaigns to exercise effective management for the different bids and settings previously.
In an effort to address how consumers are searching today on a variety of devices whilst being on the move, Google have created enhanced campaigns. This new AdWords feature will incorporate all of these settings to make them work together inside one campaign.
What Are Enhanced Campaigns?
The new enhanced campaign feature has been created to better suit advertisers who are looking to target users with specific criteria such as the device used to search, by allowing the use of bid adjustments across these devices. You can apply bid adjustments for users in specific locations and for the time of day or day of week etc. These bid adjustments can vary between -90% to as much as +900% of the ad group maximum bid. You can also use a bid adjustment of -100% for mobile devices (effectively stopping the ads from showing at all) or a bid modifier of between -90% up to as much as +300%.
An Example Of How Bid Adjustments Work
An ad group has a maximum CPC bid of £1. A -20% bid modifier has been applied if the user is searching on a mobile, a +30% bid modifier if the user is searching at 5pm and a +50% bid modifier if the user is searching on a Friday. If the user met all of this criteria, the resulting bid would be-
Your maximum CPC starting bid – £1.00
Mobile searcher – modifier of -20% = £0.80p
Time of day – modifier of +30% = £1.04
Day of week – modifier of +50% = £1.56
Resulting bid = £1.56
If you feel that maths is not your strong point (eeaaaakkk!), do not fear as there is also a bid adjustment calculator to get a clear picture of what you’re resulting bid will be after applying multiple adjustments.
The new enhanced campaign allows advertisers to show the right type of ad to a user depending on the type of device they are searching with. For example, an advertiser creates an ad group and writes 2 text ads; one with the ‘device preference box’ checked, and one without. When a user searches on a mobile device, the mobile optimised ad will show. If the user searches on a desktop or laptop computer, the standard text ad will show.
It’s not possible to switch off targeting ads to desktops and tablets with the new enhanced campaign type (this seems to have sparked a negative reaction in a lot of account managers from what I’ve seen so far), but you can switch off targeting mobile devices by adding a bid modifier of -100%, so in effect your bid would be zero and your ads will not show on mobile devices at all.
Upgraded Ad Extensions
Also, with this new campaign type, there are upgraded ad extensions. Ads will still show on various devices complete with the appropriate ad extension or app, but the ad extensions can now be created at the campaign or ad group level. These extensions can be scheduled to run with start and end dates, they can be edited and it will not affect any of their previous performance statistics. Also, each extension will go through ad approval independently so if one is disapproved, it only affects that specific extension allowing other extensions to run. The old style or ‘legacy’ extensions are still available and can also be used, but they will not run with the same functionality as the new upgraded extensions.
Along with these changes there will be new reporting features, including new report information displaying on the devices, locations and ad scheduling sub tabs of the settings tab.
What Do I Need To Do Next?
With the move to enhanced campaigns, advertisers who have previously managed campaigns separately for devices are being advised to merge their campaigns. Advice on why and how to complete this action can be found on the AdWords Enhanced Campaigns site, as well as the Google Help Centre and a series of webinars that Google are currently running.
The new enhanced campaign feature will be fully rolled out by summer this year, there’s no opt out available. Many account managers will have noticed a button on their individual campaigns to start the upgrade. However, once you click to upgrade, there’s no going back! so if you are not completely sure of how it all works yet, allow yourself a little time to learn more about the settings and techniques for this new campaign strategy before jumping in.
How do you feel about these changes with Enhanced campaigns?