You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, I’m telling you why… because Enhanced Campaigns are coming to town. While Santa Claus isn’t coming to town early, Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns are and they could be a lump of coal for some and a shiny new bike for others. Google has officially announced that Enhanced campaign conversions will automatically begin on July 22. What this means is that you’re about to enter a period where you need to pay extra special attention to the details in your AdWords account. This needs to be done to ensure that Google is not setting your wallet on fire and that you continue to receive the best possible performance out of your account.
Mobile Traffic
If you have seen that website visitors arriving through desktops & laptops are more likely to become customers than people who view your page on a mobile device, you need to pay extra special attention. In Enhanced Campaigns, all advertisers are automatically opted-in to having their ads show for mobile devices. If you have mobile traffic off you will need to reset this and it is a very different process.
From your account page, you will want to go to the settings tab then the sub-tab for Devices. Under that you can set the bid to a -100% for mobile devices effectively bidding zero for mobile traffic.
Bid Adjustments are the big area of change and if you fully deploy this you will need a calculator handy to figure out your bids. There is a matrix with percentage adjustments in the schedule, device types, and geographic locations. This is incredibly powerful but it can also be complex unless you are used to expressing your strategy in matrixes. Add to this process the scripting automation and you can see that Google AdWords at its upper level is an advanced programming language. For example:
| Modifier Type | Bid | |
| Base Bid | $2.00 | |
| Schedule | 2.40 | +20% |
| Location | 2.64 | +10% |
| Device | 2.50 | -5% |
Our staff attended all the training on this topic but as we know Google is a master at partial information so nobody knows yet the exact order of math. The new bidding options could be applied in order which could make our example range from the $2.64 down to $2.60. Figuring out Google’s new bidding order of operations is going to take experience with the system because so far Google is not talking.
Schedule Modifiers
This modifier has been around for years but the process of applying it is different. Many clients have a pattern to their week with certain hours being better than others. This modifier allows you to adjust for that. For example many businesses in the trades see a peak time Monday morning from 8am -10:30. Some of us believe this is the “Honey Do” effect where the customer is encouraged to call the service after the weekend is over. This makes that time period very responsive and many businesses like to increase their bids during that time. Schedule modifiers have been in the system for a very long time and the new items of Location and Device appear to be based on that model.
Location Modifier
This is a new modifier and for every geo-target in the campaign, you can adjust your bids by the modifier. This should be useful for local service businesses that have a better response from certain cities and they are willing to pay more or less than their base bid. We often have had requests to target high income cities above others. This lets you do that.
Device Modifier
While the system has allowed us to turn on or off certain types of traffic previously, the enhanced campaigns take device modifications to the bid adjustment level for mobile traffic only. For those that really understand what is going on here this is a real problem because you can only adjust Desktop and Tablet in the bid but the mobile is in the modifier. We tend to think this is Google making sure that the house always wins. There are several very negative comments about the lack of this control on the other channels.
Call Extensions
Another new feature being updated (with a catch) is call extensions. There are two options; the first is to have your actual phone number featured. This sounds good, right? That is until you get into the detail and see that none of the phone reporting features are available with the usage of your own phone number.
To get any of the call reporting features activated, Google makes advertisers opt-in to Google Voice which happens to display an automatically generated (i.e. not your listed) phone number on your ad. For call extensions, businesses are placed at a dilemma. Either they can have their actual phone number show but not get any further input on the quality of the calls or they can get access to this data but have people see a randomly generated number to reach your business.
With the upcoming Enhanced campaigns feature, there are some things Google is introducing that can help improve account performance, if you know how to properly use them. However, you will also need to be more careful to ensure that the new Enhanced campaigns feature does not end up setting your wallet on fire especially if mobile is not a good performer for your business.