Google Now Serving Up Enhanced AdWord Campaigns

We are always interested in what Google is up to and how they are improving their products. Well, we heard news of some updates to their AdWords product last month so we were excited to learn more! This blog post is a quick overview of changes that are happening to Google AdWords and how you can take advantage of the new features.

If you are currently using Google AdWords, as of February, you have a new option. You can now begin using what they are calling Enhanced Campaigns. Keep in mind that Google is planning to roll out this new version of its AdWords to all advertisers June of 2013. This means that everyone will then be automatically upgraded to this enhanced version mid-year.

So, what is so fancy about this Enhanced Campaigns edition of Google AdWords? Well, Google has outlined three major updates: multi-device marketing, smarter ads based on context and more advanced reporting options.

Probably the coolest (in our opinion) upgrade is the multi-device marketing. Let’s say that you have a store and you are trying to get people who are in a certain radius to come to your store while you are open for business. Well, with enhanced campaigns you can actually increase your bid to those people on mobile devices who are close by searching for your product. You can also increase your bids only during certain hours of the day, specifically, when you are open for business. With these elements combined, you are more likely to attract a customer who is in the neighborhood while you are open.

Another great feature of Enhanced Campaigns is how ads are shown to potential customers based on their context. This basically means that now when you use Enhanced Campaigns, you are able to get the most appropriate information to the right people at the right time. Let’s say that you have a store and a website and you want to get people to both when it is most appropriate. With a single campaign you can customize an ad so that people out and about on their smartphones will see the ad and will be taken to your mobile site and those people searching for you on their home computer will be taken to your regular site. Additionally with the same ad, you can customize what people see depending on whether or not your store is open. If your store is open, smartphone users will see the ad with links to a store locator. When your store closes, the ad will automatically switch so that people searching for you will find your website so they can place an online order instead. Cool, eh?

The final feature of Enhanced Campaigns is better reporting. Basically Google has created a more dynamic, granular level of reporting to keep up with all of the various devices and how your customers are converting. The reporting will give you a better sense of how your campaigns are performing and how your return on investment is shaping up.

One thing to note is that with the new enhanced campaigns, you are no longer able to have a separate campaign that is specific to mobile devices. They are all one campaign now. Some people aren’t too happy about that. It will be interesting to see how that shakes out as more people use this new product and how and if Google makes more tweaks in the coming months.

Our recommendation is to jump in and check it out now. Get a good understanding of how you can best leverage the changes to help your business. You don’t necessarily have to switch right now but you may want to at least poke around. You will be using this new platform come June anyway so you might as well start learning now!