Enhanced Campaigns

That title isn’t a typo. With the announcement of Google’s Enhanced Campaigns, advertising is being simplified and made more context-specific, but this new iteration of AdWords is also expected to be a bit of a pain.

The mobile web has turned advertising on its head, and Google has responded with powerful AdWords features that will be rolled out over the next few months. Enhanced Campaigns will give advertisers the ability to develop multi-device, context-specific campaigns. One campaign will be flexible enough to encompass diverse devices, geographic locations, device capabilities (for app downloads or phone calls), and times of day. You’ll also be able to track different kinds of conversions, including the aforementioned calls and downloads.

Before Enhanced Campaigns, you could create multi-target advertising, such as placing a higher bid on mobile devices in specific locations and a lower bid on desktop devices, but you’d need to start multiple campaigns to do so. Now you can segment your audience within a single campaign and have more targeting control (in some respects) than before. So if a restaurant that specializes in delivery wants to target users who are nearby during lunch hours and have devices that can make phone calls, they can.

Some marketers are viewing Enhanced Campaigns with a suspicious eye, because the increased simplicity comes at the cost of control over some nuances of ad campaigns. For example, tablets and desktops will be lumped into one target group, because Google has determined that these devices have similar ad performance, and you can’t opt out of that group to create mobile-only campaigns. Advertisers will also lose the ability to target based on operating systems (except when the operating system includes a targeted device capability, such as offering an app download). These changes reduce advertiser control and eliminate access to data that would let advertisers analyze tablet vs. desktop or comparative operating system performance.

These concerns, and the simple fact that Google is starting to prioritize user context over device, may be why Google created a 29 page PDF to help users with the upgrade. Media Genesis can also help you manage your campaigns, and we can help you revisit your context-specific targeting strategy so that you can take full advantage of Enhanced Campaigns.