Enhanced Campaigns on Google – Quick Summary of Major Changes

Google recently announced that they will be making changes to how their campaigns work.  These new AdWords campaigns are being called Enhanced Campaigns.  The main change is that AdWords is no longer allowing advertisers to easily split out campaigns by device.  Overall, most of the changes are positive, but Google has taken away some flexibility and control.

Here is the AdWords blog post announcing Enhanced Campaigns.

Below are the biggest pros and cons of the new campaigns.

Positive changes
1. Bids based on location (can set different bids for different states in 1 campaign)
2. Ad group Sitelinks
3. Mobile-specific ads in same campaign as desktop ads
4. Sitelink scheduling, reporting per Sitelink, and other minor changes

Negative changes
1. Tablet and desktops are grouped together and must have the same bids
2. Budgeting for mobile (can’t set separate budgets)
3. Mobile keyword bidding
-Bidding is at the campaign level for devices.  You can bid mobile at 50% of desktops, but you might find a selection of keywords that perform better or worse on mobile and not want to have them bid at that default level.

Here at Metric Theory we are staying on top of the changes and developing transition plans for each individual advertiser.  Since Google has stated that current Legacy campaigns won’t be shifted over to Enhanced Campaigns until June, we’re advocating that most clients hold off on transitioning.  This provides the benefit of collecting some data and best practices from several test accounts in the meantime.  It’s also possible that Google may slightly alter some features of Enhanced Campaigns due to advertiser feedback.

Overall, most advertisers shouldn’t see a major impact from switching over to Enhanced Campaigns, but there are some details to pay attention to (i.e. – setting mobile phone bids or completely turning off mobile phones with a -100% bid).  As data geeks, we’re looking forward to analyzing and leveraging geographic and other data to take full advantage of the new options and features!  Please don’t hesitate to reach out to us with questions on Enhanced Campaigns.

If you would like to see more details, here are two links from Google which further explain the changes:
About enhanced campaigns
Upgraded ad extensions in enhanced campaigns

There is also a good round-up of the changes at SearchEngineWatch.

Lastly, Google is hosting a series of Enhanced Campaigns webinars.