In February, Google announced a new AdWords update – Enhanced Campaigns – and described it as ‘a first step to help you more simply and smartly manage your ad campaigns in today’s multi-device world’.
Earlier this week, they began the process of automatically upgrading all AdWords accounts with the Enhanced Campaign’s new features. What are these features? What benefits do they hold? And do you need to do anything? This straight forward “how to create enhanced campaigns” guide has all the answers.
Upgrading
If you haven’t been upgraded yet, it’ll take you just a couple of minutes. Log in to your AdWords account & you’ll either be presented with a notification (below) or you’ll need to click on ‘Upgrade centre’ in the left hand navigation. If you’re greeted with a message saying ‘100% of your campaigns have been upgraded’, then bingo! If not, click on ‘Get started’ and follow the process.
New Feature No 1: Target Audiences
Before: If you wanted to target customers depending on device, location & time of day previously, you might have set up different Campaigns focusing on each of those aspects & run multiple reports to determine what Return-on-Investment each one was generating.
Today: With Enhanced Campaigns, you can target each of those audiences from a single Campaign, using bid adjustments. So, let’s say you’ve got a Pizzeria in central Bath and you know that your campaign performs really well on desktop computers on weekdays, with the lunchtime office crowd. You can now increase bids for PCs and Bath, and decrease bids on Saturdays and Sundays within one Campaign.
What You Need to Do: Determine what’s working successfully for your business in terms of device, location & time of day. This may be fairly obvious (like the Pizzeria) or you may need to do some investigation. The best way to do this is to select the longest date range possible, then head to the Dimensions tab. Here you can look at location & time, and sort by conversions to see when and where the most valuable clicks are coming from. You can do this for the account overall, or per Campaign (by clicking in to each Campaign first).
To see what sort of results you’re getting from each device; go to the Keywords tab, then ‘Segment’, then ‘Device’. Again, sort by conversions to determine which devices are bringing you the converting clicks.
Then you can use the data gathered to inform your bid adjustments. To increase/decrease them, click in to each Campaign, then go to ‘Settings’, then click on each separate option, and ‘Set bid adjustment’. For the ‘Ad schedule’ one you’ll need to create an Ad Schedule before you can implement bid adjustments. Use your judgement to determine what increases or decreases to use, and check back frequently to make sure your choice is having a positive impact. If not, tweak it a little.
New Feature No 2: Mobile Users
48.4% of UK residents own a Smartphone, according to eMarketer statistics from June 2013. That’s a massive amount of potential customers that Enhanced Campaigns are trying to help you target. They now have the option to create a mobile-optimised ad with a headline, text, display URL and destination URL tailored for customers viewing your ad on mobile devices. To do so, just select the ‘Mobile’ checkbox next to the ‘Device preference’ setting when editing or creating a new text ad & write your ad specifically for people using their Smartphones. Best practice is to have one ad with that box ticked, which will show to users on mobiles and one ad without that box ticked, which will show to users on desktops, laptops & tablets.
New Feature No 3: Sitelinks
You might’ve used Sitelinks before. They’re additional links through to your website that sit below your ad (if it appears in the top position on the search results page). Well, Enhanced Campaigns have improved these. You can now include a short description of each link. Here’s Google’s example:
To update yours, go to the Ad Extensions tab, select ‘Sitelinks Extensions’ from the drop down, and then either edit your existing ones, or click on ‘New Extension’. These are a great place to include additional USPs, offers, testimonials etc.
New Feature No. 4: Conversions
Enhanced Campaigns allow you to track new conversion types: phone calls & digital downloads (mainly apps). To track these, go to the Tools and Analysis tab and select ‘Conversions’ from the drop down. Click on the green ‘Conversion’ button and then tick the relevant button. Add the relevant coding generated, to the right place on your site, and watch those conversion numbers start adding up!
So that’s it!
4 enhanced features that should make your AdWords advertising even more effective.
We’ve seen some fantastic results for our clients using these already.
If you’d like us to help you achieve the same, please get in touch!
Thanks for reading,
Libby
