Google makes Adwords more mobile friendly with ‘Enhanced Campaigns’

Google’s advertising arm is beefing up its Adwords service to optimise for all screens. The company has announced that it will be rolling out “enhanced campaigns“. According to the internet advertising heavyweight, this is the “first step to help you more simply and smartly manage your ad campaigns in today’s multi-device world.”

Google spokesperson Guillaume Bacuvier says that the company understands the importance of multiple devices and how they have proliferated our world. This new AdWords update, he says, will help advertisers track and measure their campaigns better.

Bacuvier explains that smartphones and tablet devices present something of a challenge to people who might want to show different ads to consumers searching for products and services at different times of the day. Someone who searches for pizza at 1pm on a desktop computer can get a menu, while someone who searches at 8pm on a smartphone can get a click to call link and a store locator.

It is Google’s aim to use the updated AdWords to solve problems like this.

“With enhanced campaigns, instead of having to cobble together and compare several separate campaigns, reports and ad extensions to do this, the pizza restaurant can easily manage all of this in one single place,” says Google. “Enhanced campaigns help you reach people with the right ads, based on their context like location, time of day and device type, across all devices without having to set up and manage several separate campaigns.”

This new feature, which will be fully integrated in AdWords, also allows advertisers to measure the reach of their campaigns properly by, for instance, giving them the ability to track how many users used the click to call feature.

Google is hoping to roll out enhanced campaigns to all AdWords accounts by mid 2013 but all new users who sign up now will be able to use the new feature.

Key features

Here’s an overview of some key features.

1. Powerful marketing tools for the multi-device world
People want search results that are relevant for the context they are in for example — their device, location and the time of day. Enhanced campaigns help you better manage your campaigns and budgets for this multi-device world. With bid adjustments, you can manage bids for your ads across devices, locations, time of day and more — all from a single campaign.

Example: A breakfast cafe wants to reach people nearby searching for [coffee] or [breakfast] on a smartphone. Using bid adjustments, with three simple entries, they can bid 25% higher for people searching a half-mile away, 20% lower for searches after 11am, and 50% higher for searches on smartphones. These bid adjustments can apply to all ads and all keywords in one single campaign.

2. Smarter ads optimized for varying user contexts
People on the go or near your store may be looking for different things than someone sitting at their desk. With enhanced campaigns, you’ll show ads across devices with the right ad text, sitelink, app or extension, without having to edit each campaign for every possible combination of devices, location and time of day.

Example: A national retailer with both physical locations and a website can show ads with click-to-call and location extensions for people searching on their smartphones, while showing an ad for their e-commerce website to people searching on a PC – all within a single campaign.

3. Advanced reports to measure new conversion types
Technology is enabling people to take action on your ads in new ways. Potential customers may see your ad and download your app, or they may call you. It’s been hard for marketers to easily measure and compare these interactions. To help you measure the full value of your campaigns, enhanced campaigns enables you to easily count calls and app downloads as conversions in your AdWords reports.

Example: You can count phone calls of 60 seconds or longer that result from a click-to-call ad as a conversion in your AdWords reports, and compare them to other conversions like leads, sales and downloads.