A whirlwind of upgrades, information, and new features have been spilling out of Google AdWords of late. Consider these five new features that will have advertisers and PPC managers excited about the progress.

My favorite is the keyword planner, available in select accounts. The new functionality allows editing of adgroups directly in the tool, so it can possibly replace some use of excel in campaign builds. Read about this and other kickin’ features on SEW: 5 Kickin’ New Google AdWords Features

At the heart of all the excitement surrounding Google AdWords enhanced campaigns rolling out this summer is the mobile strategy.

When mobile and tablet campaigns are required to be included with desktop, how will this impact results? To be precise, tablet is required and mobile smartphones are weighted as a percentage bid on a scale of -100 to +300 percent, but many advertisers may not know how to analyze the percentage to give.

I dug into a few accounts that combined mobile and desktop (pre-enhanced campaign) to see what we might expect for results and any common trends. These advertisers had no specific mobile strategy, which is a good sample to consider considering that many advertisers have been slow to embrace mobile strategies.

This isn’t a scientific study. Rather, it’s a snapshot of my observations of mobile and tablet behavior on “average” clients for a few months time period. Use this as an example only to determine how you may approach a full mobile campaign integration.

• Impressions: Mobile/tablet search impressions ranged from 7 to 40 percent of the total impressions, with B2B on the lower end. Mobile display only ranged from 6 to 30 percent, following a similar pattern to the search by type of client. Impressions aren’t clicks or visits, but this provides an idea as to volume and opportunity.
• Click-through rate (CTR): Mobile tended to have the same CTR as desktop or better. In many cases it was up to a 200 percent increase in the examples I looked at, but that is by no means the standard. Optimizing with mobile specific creative and offers can help pump up CTRs and at the lower CPC.
• CPC best deals: All “mobile with full browsers” campaigns had lower CPCs – from 30 to 60 percent lower than the average, revealing an opportunity to further explore the bargain CPCs. However, for tablets, the CPCs in many cases were higher than desktop or the account average. Interesting considering there is no bid adjustment in enhanced campaigns for tablets.
• Conversions: In campaigns targeting all devices pre-enhanced features, the conversions for all mobile comprised 3 to 12 percent of the total account conversions, leaning heavily with tablets. Some of them were even tablet only conversions.

The conversion numbers I observed from mobile devices seems rather disappointing. While this can be attributed to many things, such as volume, offer, usability of the mobile landing page, another reason should be considered.

According to a Google/Nielsen study released in March, three out of four mobile searches trigger follow-up actions, whether it be further research, a store visit, a phone call, a purchase or word-of-mouth sharing. Considering this, the mobile activity we see in performance snapshot may be just the starting point driving multi-channel conversions.

How to approach a mobile strategy:

• Look at the overall mobile traffic on the website from all sources. Compare to paid search to understand how it is similar or dissimilar.
• Examine the page per visit, time on site, and conversions from mobile to determine the engagement from mobile. If it’s low, new mobile campaigns will likely show more of the same low engagement, so now is the time to optimize the website experience.
• If there is a decent conversion rate and integration with the site, consider how that can be optimized to a more mobile experience with mobile specific pages, offers, or conversion paths that are easier/quicker for users.
• Dig into paid search settings by reviewing past mobile CPCs and adjusting enhanced campaign percentage to similar. Review locations or time of day to identify trends and considering bid adjustments to capture this.
• Plan ahead on ways to increase conversions based on what you know and will learn. Will the optimizations focus on bids, ad copy, landing pages, conversion path, or all of the above?

What results are you seeing in mobile and what tips do you have to maximize mobile for the enhanced campaigns transition?

On February 6th Google announced an upgrade to AdWords called Enhanced Campaigns that will allow advertisers to target consumers more efficiently with ads based on context like location, device type, and time of the day, in a single campaign.

Enhanced Campaigns have three main features:

• Campaign and budget management: An advertiser with a local presence could increase bids based on context, such as the location of the user or to adjust for device (e.g., “if this query is from mobile device, increase bid by 10%”). Bid adjustments will be found in the campaigns settings tab.
• Ads Based on Context: Advertisers will be able to differentiate mobile preferred creative where an ad would appear if the query is from a mobile device. This would take into consideration the capabilities of the device – such as whether the device can download apps or make phone calls. Mobile preferred creative will be a type of ad selection in AdWords.
• New conversion types: This will integrate phone calls from click-to-call and app downloads in AdWords reports. It will be easier to see the full value of campaigns across actions and from new platforms. Phone calls and app downloads will be additional columns as a conversion in reporting.

Here’s a look at some of the new Enhanced Campaign options that will be available in the settings tab:

Google’s motivation for this upgrade was the growing realization that we live in a constantly connected world.

“As consumers, we reach out to the device closest to us to find the information we need” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Google, “Advertisers need to be present and relevant across the growing number and wide range of devices.”

In the constantly connected world, consumers’ cross-platform behavior and search intent has changed over time:

• Consumers use multiple devices to accomplish tasks: 90 percent move sequentially between screens.
• Consumers want results that are more relevant across multiple screens and appropriate to the their location and time of day.
• Actions of the consumers will vary depending on the context, for example a person on the go is likely to respond differently to an ad than someone at a desktop computer.

Signals like location, time of day, and the capabilities of the device people are using have become increasingly important in showing them the right ad. These signals create great opportunities for businesses, but can also make marketing more complex and time-consuming. Since search and context defines user intent in the new world, Enhanced Campaigns address how advertisers can better reach them.

Overall, the enhancement is designed to make AdWords much easier to target users and manage the complex settings in a single campaign.

Enhanced campaigns will roll out to advertisers as an option over the next few weeks, and with upgrades to all campaigns in mid-2013.

Google AdWords

Winners

Dozens of new features were released for AdWords in 2012, with most of them looked upon favorably.

One of the most impactful releases, in terms of creating opportunities for advertisers, was the Analytics integration with Google remarketing. Beginning in the middle of 2012, retargeting lists could be created in Google Analytics with precise granularity, not only based on visits, but also based on any combination of segments that could represent a user’s behavior on the site. The GA remarketing lists are then assigned to and accessible from your AdWords accounts. In addition, similar targeting improvements in the AdWords interface that allow advertisers to define lists based on URLs instead of creating new codes, are really advanced level features that move the dial on any PPC account.

Losers

Ad rotation settings in AdWords allow advertisers to optimize and test ads using ‘optimize for clicks’, ‘optimize for conversions’, or ‘rotate evenly’. In April, some PPC managers were outraged when Google announced that using the ‘rotate evenly’ setting indefinitely can inhibit performance and serve poor quality ads. Instead of rotating the ads indefinitely, the setting would automatically default to a period of 30 days, then ‘optimize to show the ads expected to generate the most clicks’. This gave Google, rather than the advertiser, more control.

With all of the strong feedback coming from the PPC community, Google extended the rotation period to 90 days and offered an opt-out. Finally, Google just completely caved and gave advertisers the ‘rotate indefinity’ setting back, so freedom was restored and all was good in PPC land.

R.I.P. Google TV ads. In September, Google TV ads were discontinued and quietly slipped away, perhaps putting an end to the lingering question: “Will Google someday dominate traditional media?” There’s always next year.

And just in case you didn’t Knol, this service was closed down in April. Once or twice called a “Wikipedia killer” Knol competed with Wikipedia, but offered a distinct difference in that Knol articles featured personal expertise by emphasizing authorship more similar to Squidoo and HubPages. Since Knol pages included personal opinions of the author, criticism arose over whether Google owned / hosted products like this may get unfairly favored in the SERPs.

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