Last week was the last chance for Google advertisers to enhance all of their campaigns. But don’t panic! The change – even if it seems huge – is not that complicated.
Before the “enhanced day”, in Adwords, for targeting different devices (like computers, tablets or smart phones) for one product, you had to create different campaigns, with a different budget, different ads, more keywords lists and so on. The way this worked was really stupid, in the sense that you had two campaigns that looked just the same, except one was targeting desktops while the other targeted mobile devices.
Google has created these enhanced campaigns to streamline this process. In Google’s own words, those campaigns have “more powerful bidding, smarter ads and extensions and improved reporting”. Now you can have just one campaign for all the devices and, when setting up the bids on the campaigns, you just have to choose the percentage of the desktop bid which will go to the mobile devices bid.
Another novelty on the bidding system is that you can select specific hours of the day to increase the bid of specific keywords, to adjust it to the hours of the day when you get the most conversions. The same times can be applied for the bid on the different locations of the campaign.
In situations where we want to direct specific ads just on mobile devices, we can also do it with the ad extensions, selecting “mobile”, which makes it much easier to track conversion on those devices – especially now that we have specific goals for mobile devices such as an app download or even phone call.
To demonstrate how those new campaigns can be useful for advertisers, Google published a blog post demonstrating how the enhanced campaigns helped different companies to improve their results. They also asked about the key benefits the advertisers found with the new enhanced campaigns, and discovered that the main advantages found were:
- Better way of decision making, as you can get better reporting by device and location.
- Time saving, because you reduce the number of campaigns you have to manage.
- Better control of campaigns thanks to the bid adjustments and bid flexible strategies.
- Better engagement with mobile consumers (which is a growing market).
- Better control and knowledge about how conversions work for your business, due to the specific schedules on dates, days and hours of the week, ad extensions, etc.
Has your business experienced any of these benefits after converting to enhanced campaigns?
Apart from the enhanced campaigns, Google has also launched its new keyword tool: The Keyword Planner. This tool has now replaced the traditional “Adwords Keyword tool”: you can still see the option in adwords site, but it redirects you to the Planner tool, and the same happens with the traffic estimator.
The new tool seems to be much more useful than the previous one, especially because you will find together some tools that used to be in different areas of the site (like the traffic estimator) and new uses that will help advertisers to develop their campaigns.
The tool not only gives you some ideas for new keywords, but also for creating ad groups, which is quite good, especially for beginners. Also you can do keyword research just by using a category, and even include negative keywords on the search to avoid irrelevant results.
Regarding the measure of the keyword performance we can now have more control of the budgets we want to calculate, and a better approximation of the results. Also it is generally easier to use and clearer to understand.
If you are looking to do research for a display campaign, you can also use the new tool for display campaigns and this works in a similar way to search campaigns.
If you haven’t yet had time to “play” with the new keyword planner, we strongly recommend you do and to find all the added advantages it gives you for creating new campaigns.
Have you tried Google Adword Enhanced Campaigns? Let us know in the comments how you’ve found the transition.
