Google AdWords just got a major upgrade with the announcement that enhanced campaigns are coming effective from June this year.
Here we give you an overview of what it is and why this change has been made.
So What Are Enhanced Campaigns?
Essentially, enhanced campaigns allow you to create one large campaign instead of several smaller campaigns, and then make bid adjustments based upon various criteria based on your prospects’ device, location, and time of day. There are three major features of enhanced campaigns. These are:
- The loss of the ability to target by device (e.g. desktop computer, mobile phone or mobile tablet)
- The ability to change your bids based on device, location and time of day
- The addition of new and upgraded site-links with improved reporting data
Lets look at some of changes in more depth.
Device Targeting
The new changes mean that as of mid June, you will no longer be able to separate your ad campaigns by device.
Previously we were keeping mobile campaigns separate to desktop and tablet campaigns with each campaign having a separate budget. This is because the way people search on these devices are different.
However, in the future you will no longer be able to separate campaigns out by device and allocate different budgets for campaigns on different devices.
Currently you can also target mobile and tablets by operating system. This was a great feature if you were promoting an app specifically for the iPad or iPhone or an app specifically for an android phone. Now you will will not be able to do this.
What is unclear is how this will impact your quality score. This is because it is common to have different quality scores for the same keywords when targeting mobile devices versus desktops. As we all know changes in quality score can impact how much we pay for a click. The concern here is that not being able to differentiate between devices may mean that the cost of advertising on mobile increases.
Finally, even though you are no longer able to create mobile specific campaigns, you can still create mobile specific ads. This is simply a matter of creating a new ad and ticking the new “Device Preference” box so the ad is displayed specifically for mobile.
Bid adjustments & multipliers for location, device or time of day.
Included with the new enhanced campaigns is the ability to adjust bids by location, device or time of day. This means that while you can’t have separate campaigns for mobile, tablet or desktop anymore, you can still adjust your bids for different devices.
If your site is not optimised for smart phones for example, then it might be a good to adjust the bids quite low so you ads do not display at all. For example, you could set your bids to -100% so your ads won’t trigger for smart phones.
You can also adjust bids so that they are higher or lower for specific locations (e.g. if you have a large dental clinic in the city you can set your bids to higher for those people who are closest to your business. A caveat on hid is that location targeting is only about 60-70% accurate in Australia so use this feature with caution.
New Upgraded Site-link Extensions
One of the sweeteners of moving to enhanced campaigns, is the fact that there are new options for site-links available in AdWords.
Not sure what a site-link is? The area highlighted in the red box are site-links. These appear only for ads that appear in the yellow box at the top of the search results and help you get more real estate for your ad.
If you take a peak inside the Ad Extensions tab in AdWords, you will notice that a new “offer extension” has been added into the ever growing list of extensions available.
The beauty of offer extensions is that you can now advertise special offers by adgroup. Previously the only way to do this was to create ads for specific promotions and then pause them once they expired.
Now you can set redemption dates, start and end date and add details for promotional codes to help make claiming your offer easy. You can see an example of an offer extension below:
When customers click your offer, they’ll see your offer details, business logo, and nearby stores. They can print your offer or save it to their Google Offers account for in-store redemption. At the point of sale, customers redeem the offer using either a text code or a bar code. This means you can better measure ROI.
Site-link Upgrades
The site-links, offer, call and app extensions have also been upgraded so you can now add them at the adgroup level. Previously, extensions could only be added at the campaign level. This is a great new feature as it provides the ability to have more granular control over your ads. In instances, where you have site-links at both an adgroup level and a campaign level, then the adgroup site-links will override the campaign level site-links.
Another great feature is that you can now get more detailed information on performance. Previously you could only obtain information on the performance of all the site-links. Once you migrate over to enhanced campaigns you will be able to get performance reporting by site-link rather than the group of site-links. You can reporting statistics by campaign, adgroup and even ad.
Another useful feature added in to upgraded site-links is the ability set site-links by mobile device, set start and end dates and time of day.
This feature is fantastic for added flexibility. Useful ways of taking advantage of this are:
- Setting preferred times if great for local businesses who take phone calls during business hours and who do not want their call extension displayed outside of their business hours.
- Setting start and end dates if great for offer extensions as you can create a scarcity element and have time sensitive limited offers for your campaigns
Finally if you make changes to your site-links instead of your stats resetting to zero they can continue to be included in your stats. In most cases this is a good feature, however if you are making major changes to your site-link, it might be better to delete the site-link rather than let the stats accrue.
Why Google Have Enhanced Campaigns
The cynic in me tells me that the changes are all about linings Google’s pocket and adding to their $43.6b in annual review. This follows from reports that Google’s advertising revenue has been impacted by mobile.
Whilst I can’t speak for Google’s revenue (which incidentally still looks very healthy to me), I can speak about the changes in consumer behaviour and businesses that have failed to adapt to change in the past.
While most of us are fearful of change, the fact is it is happening rather rapidly right in front of our eyes. I know this from my own behaviour.
In a few short years, my behaviour has changed from searching for everything online via my desktop to now using 4 different devices. While I tend to use the desktop computer during the day, I use either a laptop or tablet to search online in the evenings.
I take my iPad to bed and read kindle books and I use my mobile phone to tweet and comment about programs I watch on television (even though I might also be using the iPad). My mindset and what I do and search for is different on each device.
Businesses need to adapt to change
This who fail to adapt are likely to be left behind (think Kodak Cameras, Sony Walkmans, Record Stores, Yellow Pages, Harvey Norman….)
Consumer behaviour has changed. What’s clear is that more people are using multiple devices to search on the web and to complete tasks online. We now use more computer devices, more often. We are constantly connected – even when mobile. We search for everything, from everywhere across multiple devices.
The screen size and type of device used is also likely to change at different times of the day with more people using desktops during business hours and more people using mobile tablets and phones outside business hours.
Our online and offline worlds are becoming blurred.
So the objective of the change is to show ads not only relevant to search intent but also to their device, location and time of day. Our needs are different in different moments and in different devices.
Most businesses are relatively slow to adopt this change in consumer behaviour. it is understandable. It take considerable time, effort and money to revamp a website and the pace of the change is happening at an unforgiving rate.
Google is speeding up the process by forcing advertisers to make the change sooner rather than later.
The good news is that many of the changes are positive.
There is still a work-around for businesses whose sites are not mobile optimised.
We will be testing and trying out the new features ourselves to see if there are any changes in quality score and costs per click.
We are also eager to try some of the enhanced site-links and get more reporting data from them.
Most accounts will roll out at the appropriate time but feel free to contact us if you have any questions about your account or want to try enhanced campaigns earlier.