Today is the day that Google will automatically upgrade advertisers’ old legacy campaigns to the new enhanced campaigns within AdWords.
Google launched the new campaigns back in February of this year, and a month ago 4.5 million campaigns had already been manually upgraded to enhanced, but today all campaigns will be automatically upgraded by Google, and the old legacy campaigns will no longer exist.
But what is new with enhanced campaigns?
Google states that the new enhanced campaigns have more “powerful bidding, smarter ads and extensions and improved reporting”.
Changes to bidding mean that advertisers can no longer only target desktop/laptop computers, tablets with full browsers and/or mobiles with full browsers or a combination of the three. The new campaigns force advertisers to adjust their bids based on device, ie. decrease their bids by 25% for searches on mobile devices.
They also allow advertisers to increase their keyword bids during chosen times of day or days of the week, depending on when they receive the most leads / make the most sales or decrease them at less profitable times of day. Also if an advertiser is targeting multiple locations within one campaign they can increase/decrease their bids for any of those locations.
Advertisers can also customise their ads and optimise their ad extensions for mobile devices. For example if a business has a mobile app they can create an app extension and choose ‘Mobile’ as the ‘device preference’ and then that extension should show alongside their ads for searches on their terms when the user is on a mobile device.
Enhanced campaigns also allow advertisers to measure the number of calls, app downloads and more to help optimise their campaigns for different devices.
Google has published some case studies on its blog, showing the results some of its bigger advertisers have witnessed since changing over to enhanced campaigns, which makes quite interesting reading.
But what do you think of the new enhanced campaigns? Have you seen improvements like the advertisers highlighted in Google’s blog post? For example M&M’s saw “41% increase in conversion rates, 22% increase in revenue, and 31% boost in ROI for search campaigns”, which is based on comparing the 3 weeks prior to the switch over to the 3 weeks after.
I personally struggle to believe that it was purely the features of the enhanced campaigns that drove these improvements. When reading the full case study M&M’s did reduce their number of campaigns from 150 to 50, so changes were made to the account at the same time as the upgrade, that would have also helped towards the improvements.
