Two big AdWords changes

Once a week I summon up the courage to do a weekly shop at Morrisons. It takes courage, because I hate supermarkets.

Fortunately I have a system which means I spend as little time there as possible. It resembles something like the TV programme ‘supermarket dash’.
Every now and then, Morrisons will break my system by moving everything around.
Those of you who use AdWords regularly will know that Google do a similar thing. They are always tinkering with the interface, introducing new features, and generally hiding things. What was once found on the ‘networks’ tab is now on the ‘display’ tab, for example.
Every now and then, Google will change something really big. These changes are what Americans would call ‘game changers’, and there are two happening at the moment.

Product Listing Ads

First, we have the well documented move from free shopping results to paid product listing ads. As of this month (in the UK), ecommerce merchants will have to link Google Merchant Center to AdWords, and pay per click for products to appear in the shopping listings.
These shopping listings are often pulled in to the main search results for relevant terms. (Click image to enlarge).

It may sound self-serving, but I think the move to paid product listings is a good thing. It will force merchants to improve the quality of their feeds, and paying for clicks tends to focus the mind on improving your conversion rate.

Enhanced Campaigns

Second, we have enhanced campaigns, which will be appearing in your account very soon.
Throughout the day, we may use Google from a variety of different devices, locations and contexts. You may be waiting for the train on your smartphone. You may be in Starbucks on your tablet. You may (heaven forbid) be at work on your desktop.
Google has access to a huge amount of information about the people entering your targeted key phrases. Enhanced campaigns allow you to automatically adjust your bids depending on the time of day, device the search was done from, and geographic location.
Let’s say you run a sandwich shop. You can bid four times as much for someone searching for ‘sandwiches’ on a smartphone within one mile of your shop, as you would for someone four miles away on a tablet.
Technically none of this is new. You have always been able to target people based on device, time of day and location, but previously it involved a lot of work. Because these are campaigns settings, you would need one campaigns for each device, a campaign for each period of the day, and different campaigns for different geographies. Once you start combining these things you end up with a lot of campaigns.
More campaigns means more work managing them.
With enhanced campaigns, you just have one campaign and adjust the bid settings for people depending on their device / location / time. For busy people who don’t have a lot of time to devote to AdWords, this is a big change.

(Screenshot from Search Engine Land)
It isn’t going to be right for everyone, but I think it’s a great tool to have in the AdWords toolkit.
Google see mobile ad revenue as a big growth opportunity. Many advertisers either turn mobile traffic off, or bundle mobile traffic in with desktop traffic.
If you manage your own AdWords campaigns, I think this is a change worth paying attention to. You can watch a short video on enhanced campaigns here.
Enhanced campaigns do mean a loss of control and transparency. If you have a lot of mobile traffic, or want to write different ads specifically for mobile devices, you will still be better off with separate campaigns.
Clear as mud? If you have any questions feel free to comment on the blog.

Rob Drummond
www.rjdrummond.com 

 

www.handymansolutions.uk.com