Adwords – It's Time to Upgrade to Enhanced Campaigns

The deadline is getting closer to when your Google Adwords campaigns will be automatically upgraded to “Enhanced Campaigns“. Is your PPC team ready for the change? It makes sense to get them up to speed now, because if you don’t upgrade yourself, Google will do it for you on July 22, 2013. You are much better served if your Adwords managers make a strategic change and learn best practices so there aren’t any big surprises.

What are Enhanced Campaigns and why do I care?
Enhanced Adwords campaigns are an updated suite of services to cater to both web searchers and the fast growing market of mobile search. Take a look at your analytics and you’ll probably see a dramatic increase of users visiting your site through mobile devices from phones to tablets over the last year. Enhanced campaigns will also make targeting more specific, yielding you lower costs.

In the past you had to create separate ads to cater to the individual devices and it was pretty hard to track it all and see what was effective and what was not. Enhanced campaigns will allow you to target by device, time of day, location and dynamically display ads optimized for the device they are being viewed on.

Benefits of enhanced campaigns

• Detailed Sitelinks – You’ll be able to nominate specific text for your sitelinks, giving you the ability to customize what the user sees with your sitelinks
• Mobile is easier – Mobile bids will be adjusted by you at the campaign level, set “click to call” for mobile users. No more additional fees per call
• Moderate Pricing by device – You’ll be able to bid on mobile and non-mobile devices in the same campaign. If you want your mobile app to only display on mobile, just set your bid accordingly
• Day and time bids – Say your shop is closed on Sundays and open the rest of the week from 9-6. You’ll be able to set bids for your ads so they don’t display when you’re not open. (Uses the time zone of the business, not the searcher)
• Location bid adjustments – Target your ads to people searching near you
• Campaign level management – No more multiple campaigns for locations or devices
• Custom display ads – Target users by interest, demographics and remarketing tools
• Contextual Targeting – Google evaluates websites to find the best possible placement for your display ads based on the contnet of the site, your keywords and topics

Show me the money

• Take a look at this case study from American Apparel. They increased conversions by 100% and increased CTR by 7%
• Loews Hotels used remarketing and similar audiences to increase revenue by a stunning 10%
• Woodbridge Funding increased leads from smart phones from 20% to 50%and boosted conversion rates by 6%
• Vivastreet set a mobile bid modifier of first +25% and then +40%. Within few weeks Vivastreet’s conversions had increased by 34%

Sounds good! What should we do before converting?

Don’t just flip the switch without planning ahead. Take a look at the campaigns you’ve got set up and plan for how you’re going to make changes for to suit your needs and account for the modifiers for the various devices.

Wait, what are “Modifiers”?
Device modifiers, or “mobile bid adjustments” can be set between -100% and +300% of the basic bid. So for example a keyword bid of $1 with a device modifier of 50% would be paying $1.50 per click if the user was on a smart phone. If you wanted to opt out of mobile ads for that particular ad, you’d simply set the modifier to -100% and your ad wouldn’t be displayed on Mobile devices. Set it to +0 and you’d pay the same amount on a mobile device as on a desktop. Variations on this theme can be created to suit how often you want the ad to be displayed on mobile or desktop.

Fine tune and watch for spikes
This is going to take some experimentation and spikesin costs are inevitable. It will be more important than ever to keep an eye on your ad spend and control it appropriately. This is especially true when setting multiple modifiers for the same ads. If you set a modifier for mobile at +100%, a time modifier for your peak hours at +100% and a geographic modifier for +100% too you could hit a sweet spot and end up paying WAY more than you bargained for. Remember these bids compound on top of each other.

A $5 bid could look like this with stacked modifiers:

• Original bid $5
• X Mobile modifier of +100% = $10 bid
• X Time modifier of +100% = $20 bid
• X Geographic moderator of +100%=$40 bid

You’d probably win the bid at least, but the results may not be what you expected.

Using Google’s default adjustments
Initially Google can set your bids for you based on what your competitor’s are bidding within the search network only. If you already have mobile campaigns set up, Google will set those at +0% modifiers so the bids will stay the same.

Need help?
At Tatu Digital we’re working with clients to re-tool their ad campaigns right now so they are ahead of the game when those who don’t make the change are automatically updated on July 22. We’re taking this opportunity to look deeper into their campaigns and analytics and identify opportunities they may have missed with mobile devices, geo-location, time sensitive ads and click to call.

We are a Google Engage Agency partner. That means we are constantly learning about Google’s new features from Google themselves and access to discounts and soffers to pass on to our PPC (pay per click) clients. If you need help updating your current Adwords campaign or getting it ready for conversion, we’re here for you. Contact us right now and let’s get to work!