Here’s some quick information concerning Google’s recent announcement about Enhanced Campaigns.

Relayed to me by Steve Burnett, the Director of Digital Paid Media @ ethology

This update is a significant change to the AdWords platform that will hopefully simplify the way DPM specialists organize, optimize and report on AdWords campaigns in a multi-device world.  In summary, the changes will:

• Simplify how marketers target campaigns across multiple geo-targets and multiple devices by incorporating more targeting capabilities at the campaign level:
  • No need to duplicate campaigns that target desktop, tablet and/or mobile, Google will recognize the device prompting the search and serve the most optimized advertising.
  • No need to designate location-specific campaigns, Google will recognize the physical location of the searcher and serve the most geographically relevant ad.
• Bidding now occurs at the Campaign level, not at the keyword level and is set based on location and device preference.  With streamlined bid adjustments, manage bids for ads across devices, locations, time of day and more – all from a single campaign.  For example:
  • Location bidding – increase bids on particular keywords if a searcher is within X miles of a business
  • Device bidding – increase bids if someone is searching from an iPad or Droid mobile phone
  • Enhanced day parting – increase bids across multiple devices and/or locations during particular business times (promote happy hour, call center hours, or hours when business is slower)
• “Smarter ads” optimized for different user contexts:
  • Reduce the amount of individual ads needed for geo-targeted advertising or device-specific campaigns
  • Build a library of creative “smarter ads” that auto-optimize based on location, device and context
  • For example:
    • Automatically produce ads that show Store Locator maps during business hours
    • Automatically generate creative based on device and location
    • Automatically generate sitelink extensions based on device, location and context
• Advanced reporting capabilities that measure new conversion types:
  • Enable reporting on individual Sitelink extensions
    • Also, streamlines the approval process and scheduling of sitelinks
  • Enhances call tracking to include calls over X minutes
  • (FUTURE) Enables tracking of new conversion types such as digital downloads (music, books, etc.), calls over X minutes, Ad Extension conversions, In-store purchases, cross-device conversions
• Other things to point out:
  • Simplify device targeting by rolling tablets into the same targeting category as desktop.
  • Device targeting will still be enabled through separate display campaigns and bidding will also be separate.
  • Mobile bids will be controlled by the advertiser through some type of bid modifier or accelerator, Smart Pricing goes away.

For more information, please visit the link announcing the upgrades at: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2013/02/introducing-enhanced-campaigns.html

(stupid sexy Flanders)