Important Considerations Before Switching To Enhanced Campaigns

Transcription

1 Important Considerations Before Switching To Enhanced Campaigns How do I set my bid multipliers? How will location targeting change? What do I need to know before I switch to enhanced campaigns? Google has given you until July 2013 to make the switch to enhanced campaigns. Around this time, they ll force-merge your campaigns for you automatically. Don t be nervous but don t wait to let Google do it for you, because without some simple preparation, you could be caught scrambling to understand how the new campaigns will perform. These steps will give you valuable data about how you currently run on mobile, tablet and desktop necessary information to help you set bid multipliers and adjust to the change without losing profi tability or Quality Score. Before July, spend some time considering the way your AdWords campaign works now.

2 1 MOBILE S Consideration IMPACT How much does your business rely on mobile and tablets? Here s how to find out: in the Campaigns view in AdWords, segment by device. Scroll to the bottom of the list to expand Total = all campaigns. Let s look at the campaign of a real PPC client. CONCERN: You may notice that CPAs for computers and tablets are roughly equal to each other, but mobile CPA is 50% higher. Why? It looks like bid prices are not the problem they re quite a bit lower for mobile, which is normal but conversion rates on mobile are lower by 66%. In this screenshot, mobile represents about a quarter of overall spend. This is a substantial share of spend, which means: 1 - Mobile is important to this business 2 - We need to be careful as we transition to enhanced campaigns

3 DIAGNOSIS: Potential mobile funnel issues, which isn t a problem that can be solved in AdWords. (Let s save the topic of mobile site optimization for another day but it s a good catch from this simple report.) [Note: In this case the client has a responsive web site, which means the site serves up different content based on the device that is viewing it. Kudos! However, something in the mobile funnel still appears to need help, and the product team will have their work cut out for them tracking that down.] Since there is a discrepancy in CPAs for mobile and desktop/tablet, our fi rst consideration is to decide how we will handle this problem when all devices merge together in one enhanced campaign. If our goal is to level CPAs between mobile and other devices, then we need to bring our mobile CPA down by 33% so it s in line with computers and tablets. With enhanced campaigns, this is done by using a bid multiplier, found in campaign settings under Desktops & laptops, mobile devices and tablets > Change mobile bid adjustment. From there we can set our mobile bid adjustment to Decrease by 33%. Google s built-in calculator is very handy here. But remember, bids were already quite low for mobile, and reducing them further may put us in danger of falling off the page of Google s search results. We ll keep an eye on average positions for our mobile ads, and let s hope the product team fi xes that funnel issue soon. Google announced in early April that mobile-only bids may be set at the ad group level rather than just at the campaign level. This is great news for many advertisers. Since this functionality is not yet live, we can t direct you to how this will show up in the AdWords Enhanced Campaign interface just yet. KEY TAKEAWAY: Understanding how important devices are to your campaign now and how CPA and click prices compare to your desktop campaigns will help you set up enhanced campaigns without any surprises.

4 2 Consideration LOCATION-SPECIFIC TARGETS Let s look at a global advertiser that sells products to 5 countries around the world. In the days before enhanced campaigns, we would have 5 campaigns one for each country separately managing bids, ad copy, keywords and negatives across all 5 campaigns. Luckily, this is all much simpler with enhanced campaigns. As with mobile devices, we will use a bid multiplier for each of our locations. This is done at the campaign settings level. But how do we know what multipliers to use? First, we need a birds-eye view of how our 5 locations are doing let s export some data from AdWords into an Excel pivot table. In AdWords, navigate to Dimensions, then choose View: Geographic from the dropdown. Set your time period to give you a solid data set, then click the download button.

5 LOCATION-SPECIFIC TARGETS CONTINUED Open your report in Excel and create a pivot table resembling this screenshot. In this data, we are dealing with just 5 locations; you may have many more (or even fewer) locations. We see that CPAs for Australia and United Kingdom are considerably higher (30-40%) than our account average, making them good candidates for a decrease bid adjustment. To do this, navigate to your campaign s Settings tab, then find Locations in one of the new sub-tabs. Find your locations in the list and edit bids accordingly. [Tip: the CPA column is a calculated field with the following formula: =Cost/ Conv. (1-per-click).] KEY TAKEAWAY: Enhanced campaigns can really simplify your location targeting, but you ll need to do some extra work with your pre-enhanced campaigns data before you make the switch.

6 MOBILE-ONLY ADS If you are on the ball and your website employs Consideration 3 responsive design, kudos! What does responsive mean? It means your web server identifies a visitor s device and serves up content appropriate to that device. So, if a visitor arrives on an iphone, the responsive site serves up content optimized for an iphone s browser. The same can be true for other devices, such as Android, ipad, desktops, etc. However, if your site is not responsive, but you value mobile traffic, chances are good you already have optimized your pages for mobile and are hosting them on a separate sub-domain or in a sub-directory. Facebook does this for their m.facebook.com server notice the m in there? Many sites use m. or mobile. for mobile-specific traffic, which leads us to our important consideration. Enhanced campaigns allow us to choose which of our destination URLs are mobile-only. We can even select a block of destination URLs and set their device preference in one click using AdWords Editor. [Note: AdWords Editor version now fully supports enhanced campaigns.] To set all of your mobile-only URLs to the mobile device preference using AdWords Editor, first select all URLs containing m. or mobile. or whatever differentiates your mobile URLs from desktop/tablet URLs. Then, in one click, change your device settings for the entire batch. It is important to understand that your only available options for the device preference are All or Mobile. You cannot set URL device preferences for desktops only or tablets only. If you value mobile traffic and you set URL device preferences to All, the only control you will have over traffic from desktops, tablets, and mobile devices is via the bid multiplier campaign setting we discussed in step one. KEY TAKEAWAY: Enhanced campaigns does not allow you to run desktop-only campaigns, but you will have some control over what landing pages a mobile user sees. If you don t already have a site that is designed to accommodate mobile visitors, now is the time to take that next step.

7 4 Consideration SITELINKS FOR AD GROUPS A very positive update with enhanced campaigns is the move from campaign level to ad group level sitelinks. Ad groups can vary signifi cantly from one another, even if they re in the same campaign. But until now, one set of sitelinks had to work across all ad groups, as disparate as they may have been. Employing sitelinks at the ad group level will increase your CTRs when used well. Take the time to go ad group by ad group to craft your sitelinks according to search intent. KEY TAKEAWAY: Enhanced campaigns gives you the flexibility to tailor your sitelinks to each ad group. Put in the time now to update sitelinks and it will pay off with an increased CTR and (probably) a boost in Quality Score. An ad group focused around tennis racquets might lend well to sitelinks that mention other items commonly purchased alongside tennis racquets, such as tennis balls, racquet grips, racquet bags, etc. Here you can dig through analytics data to fi nd interesting ways to group together sitelinks. One of the gotchas with enhanced campaigns, sitelinks and AdWords Editor is this: AE does not support ad group level sitelinks. Gotcha! In fact, some folks have reported strange things happening after downloading enhanced campaigns to AE, such as losing sitelinks completely, even at the campaign level. We re pretty sure this issue will be addressed in the next version of AdWords Editor, so stick to the regular AdWords dashboard for managing sitelinks for now.

8 Final Thoughts Like everything else in Google AdWords, it pays to understand the tools well but uniquely, in this case it pays to understand your current campaigns before you make the switch! Trada is the world s only performance-based PPC marketplace. We assign teams of specialized PPC experts to work for your mid-sized company or agency. They re paid when they beat your CPA goals. Visit us at or call us today at to see if you re a fit for a partnership! CPC Search is a San Francisco PPC agency that helps medium to large advertisers win at the game of pay-per-click. Visit us at or call today. Keep learning Visit us online!