AdWords Enhanced Campaigns: What You Need to Know

Google has announced a major update to its AdWords advertising platform, with the introduction of ‘enhanced campaigns’. According to the AdWords blog, it is meant to help advertisers manage ad campaigns more simply and smartly in today’s multi-device world.

What are enhanced campaigns?

Enhanced campaigns let you manage bids across devices, location and time, allowing you to bid higher or lower based on the user’s proximity to you, or the device that they’re using.

You can also show the right ad, sitelink, app or extension based on user context and device capabilities. An example cited by Google is that “a national retailer with both physical locations and a website can show ads with click-to-call and location extensions for people searching on their smartphones, while showing an ad for their e-commerce website to people searching on a PC — all within a single campaign”.

In addition to the above, advertisers will have access to detailed call reporting, with free Google forwarding numbers and conversion metrics for digital download campaigns.

The core changes that have been made in enhanced campaigns are as follows:

• Enhanced campaigns give you control over the mobile bid by allowing you to set bids for mobile ads to a percentage of your default bids. They can range from -100% (your ads won’t be shown to mobile users) to +300% of your default bids.
• Advertisers do not have the option of splitting campaigns targeting desktop devices and tablet devices separately. Under enhanced campaigns, tablets and desktop devices are grouped as one device type with the following exceptions:
  • Ads for app promotion will only appear on devices that the app operates on. For example, ads that promote your latest Android tablet app will only show on Android tablets.
  • For “Display Network only” campaigns, advertisers will be able to target the device models where an ad can run.
  • For display ads, certain formats (for example, 3rd party ad serving/HTML5) will have a “Touch Device” filter for ads.

Upgraded extensions

In addition to the above changes, enhanced campaigns let you use new features on four types of ad extensions:  call extensions, app extensions, sitelink extensions and offer extensions. These new features let you:

• Create an extension for your campaign or ad group, which means you’ll have more control over which ads your extensions are shown with.
• Schedule start and end dates for your extension to run on specific days of week and times of day.
• Specify sitelink extensions you want to give preference to on mobile.
• Each extension will go through an ad approval process separately. This means that if you create four sitelinks, for example, and three are approved and one is disapproved, then the three approved sitelinks are still eligible to appear with your ads.
• Edit each extension without resetting its performance statistics. In comparison, when you edit an extension in a non-enhanced campaign, AdWords creates a new extension and delete the edited one.
• You’ll receive performance data for each extension. For example, you’ll be able to see how many clicks or impressions an individual sitelink received. This means you’ll be able to better evaluate the performance of each extension.

Enhanced campaigns will roll out to advertisers as an option beginning in February 2013 and all campaigns will be upgraded by mid-2013. If you need assistance, contact the Google ads team.

If you’re ready to upgrade, and you want a detailed guide on upgrading your account to Enhanced Campaigns, we recommend reading this step by step guide here.

seoptimise.com