Enhanced Campaigns ‑ The Day Has Come...Sort Of

July 25, 2013

blog meme

Most PPC advertisers considered the day that Google announced enhanced campaigns to have been somewhat earth shattering. After years of advertisers (and our clients) building budget and strategies around the theory that it’s best to target campaigns by device, we were told to revert back and roll everything into one? What!?

Are you excited? Have you prepared? Ready or not, Enhanced Campaigns is a reality that started to roll out across AdWords accounts on Monday, but it may take up to a few weeks for all AdWords accounts to be upgraded into the new format.

Our PPC Team has been working with the Enhanced format for a few months. While it’s too soon to definitively say that the Enhanced Campaigns is “the best thing since sitelinks” or “the worst thing since we heard about Enhanced Campaigns,” I have some initial pros & cons and would love to know what other PPCers think about the switch.

Features that I love:

Clean and condensed

  • Let’s say that you had 100 unique campaigns targeted across all three devices: desktop, tablet and mobile. Total campaign count equates to 300. With the switch, your 300 campaigns have been cut down to 100. Fewer campaigns to manage makes the uploading and auditing process much quicker. You will need to segment data by device to understand mobile performance, but the overall “cleanup” of combining devices definitely created a time-saver, especially for advertisers that spent hours uploading and auditing the same keywords/ads/negatives across three types of campaigns.

Enhanced Sitelinks

  • Prior to joining my fellow LunaMetricians, I was asked, “What is your favorite add extension?” My response? “Sitelinks. I love sitelinks.” You can imagine my delight when they released the feature allowing advertisers to add text to sitelinks. This is gives you the ability to 1.) further increase the size of your ad and 2.) provide more detail about your product/service in 70 characters or less. Note that the character limit of newly-added sitelinks has been cut from 35 to 25 characters. Lastly, you can apply sitelinks at the Ad Group level. Hello retailers: are you shedding tears of joy?

Bid Adjustments

There are a couple of options to adjust bids based on performance

  • By device: If you know that mobile tends to perform poorly as compared to desktop/tablet, then set a negative bid adjustment by -100% to opt out of serving on mobile.
  • By location: Do you have a few different locations targeted to one campaign? Does a particular city, state or country perform better than another? You now have the ability to adjust those bids by specific location based on performance.
  • By location extension: This is a pretty handy feature, especially if you are driving a search-to-store promotion. Increase the bid adjustment to push ads higher to those who are physically near your location extension.

Features that I don’t love:

  • I’m still would love to budget tablet separately. This one is going to take a while for me to get over. As far as reporting, Value Track will allow you to track performance by device, assuming that your destination URLs are at the keyword level.  

 

In a nutshell, I am much more excited about Enhanced Campaigns than when Google first rocked our PPC world. It seems like the new look and features have the potential to positively effect performance. As with any big change, to be successful call for lots of research, patience, data, and in my case, an extra cappuccino.

What are your pros/cons of Enhanced campaigns since you made the switch?