Are You Ready For Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns?

Google AdWords sent out some major ripples across the digital marketing world with the announcement of enhanced campaigns. Today we’re going to look at some of the key talking points and also give some advice for businesses moving forward on how to take advantage of this.

So the major talking point of enhanced campaigns is the impending removal of mobile device targeting. Previously, we were able to achieve business efficiencies or cost efficiencies by being hyper-targeted. That meant targeting location, targeting the time of day, and also targeting the device that a potential customer is using. That device targeting is now going to be rolled up into the overall settings of a campaign.

This is a shame because mobile traffic tended to act a lot differently to desktop traffic, and, as a result, we saw conversions tended to be better and average cost per click tended to be better as well. So there is likely to be some impact on those metrics when this functionality and the changes all come into play.

There are probably three scenarios really to look at here. You might well be a business that has never ever entered into the mobile advertising world and never plan to. That’s fine. Please be aware though that when the rollout comes into play later on this year that you are going to be defaulted into having your ads showing on the mobile search network. So what you need to do is make sure that your bid modifiers are set so that your ads won’t appear at all.

It might well be that you’re a business that has never got around to looking at mobile and potentially are open to that idea, and that’s very much the level that I think Google are kind of aiming this at, at the moment. It’s going to take a lot of the time and effort away that’s involved in setting up a mobile campaign as it stands now, just by rolling it all into one.

So that’s great. I think that this gives you an opportunity now though to really understand how this is going to work, because come the time that this rolls out, potentially you could end up spending a lot more money than you really need to. My advice in this instance is to set up a specific mobile campaign for your ads now so that you can learn what keywords work best. You can drill down to the locations as well or by time of day, and one of the other things that enhanced campaigns is bringing in is that you’re going to be able to set ad extensions at ad group level, which is a very good positive out of all of this.

But this sort of exercise should then give you an idea of how well your ads can interact on the mobile network. When the changes come into place, you will then be able to understand what keywords that you do want to be targeting on the mobile network so that you can use those bid modifiers to make the most of those. The same with the other metrics as well, the where and the when. Then conversely understanding the keywords, the ad text, the locations, the time of day that doesn’t work, you can drill those modifiers right the way down so that they don’t appear at all or they only appear every now and again.

So those are the first two scenarios. The third scenario, and this is where we’re going to likely see a lot of work in play, is that there are going to be businesses that have been targeting mobile devices in their own campaigns for some time now. What this is going to mean is quite a bit of work because this is now going to be all rolled into the overall settings of a campaign, and similarly you’re going to need to understand keywords, locations, time of day, looking at extensions that you’re going to want to employ as well so that come the change there is going to be as little impact as possible on your AdWords campaigns.

So my overall advice with this change is to hold on. Don’t opt in just yet. Take your time and research how this could work for you. But I think it is imperative that you act now to understand your audience and how it interacts on a mobile because there are three possible scenarios here. Either you don’t want to be seen on a mobile, so you need to obviously be aware of what action you need to take when this rolls out in full. Second of all, you may not have even considered this. So it’s best to get your research done now so that when this comes you can take advantage or as much advantage or as little advantage of this as you deem fit for your business.

Thirdly, for those people that are already targeting, you’re going to need to put some work in to make sure that when this change comes it causes the least amount of aggro to your campaign as possible.

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