Enhanced campaigns in AdWords Editor 10.0

You can now use AdWords Editor to upgrade and manage enhanced campaigns. Once you install AdWords Editor 10.0, you'll be able to:

• Upgrade campaigns to enhanced, either individually or in bulk.
• Set campaign level bid adjustments for mobile devices. 
• Set bid adjustments for targeted locations.
• Specify device preferences for individual ads (Mobile or All). 

For more details about these changes and other updates, see our AdWords Editor 10.0 release notes. For a detailed description of enhanced campaigns, please visit this overview article in the AdWords Help Center.

The next time you launch AdWords Editor, you'll see a prompt to upgrade to version 10.0. To learn more about upgrading, including how to keep unposted changes and comments when you upgrade, please review these instructions. You can also download version 10.0 from the AdWords Editor website. 

Support for previous versions of AdWords Editor will continue for four months to allow you time to upgrade. To ensure uninterrupted use of AdWords Editor, you will need to upgrade by June 28, 2013.

Posted by Rob Newton, Inside AdWords crew

Enhanced campaigns: Making it easier for customers to reach you with upgraded call extensions and sitelinks

People are constantly connected and searching from all kinds of devices. Advertisers are looking for ways to quickly provide customers with the right information, in formats that make sense for where they are, the time of day, and the device they’re using. As part of AdWords enhanced campaigns, we upgraded call extensions and sitelinks with several new features to help you reach customers in more relevant ways across these varying contexts.

In this post and a Learn with Google Webinar this Thursday, February 28th, at 10am PST (sign-up here), we’ll provide a closer look at these new features, and give you practical examples for how to use them to drive better business results.

Improved extensions for the multi-device world
In our world of constant connectivity, people expect to have the information they’re looking for right at their fingertips. Sitelinks provide your customers with links to any part of your website, directly within the ad. On average, ads with sitelinks have a 30% higher click-through rate compared to standalone ads. With enhanced campaigns, you can now customize sitelinks at the ad group level, in addition to the campaign level. You can also customize sitelinks specifically for mobile devices:

People are often looking for ways to connect with you directly on the phone. In fact, there are more than 27 million calls per month through our ads call products on mobile and desktop. In addition to calling you directly from a smartphone, people may wish to find your business’ phone number when searching from devices without call functionality like computers and tablets. With enhanced campaigns, you can now show your business phone number or a Google forwarding number in call extensions on computers and tablets. Additionally, Google forwarding numbers are now free on all devices. Learn more

Precise extension scheduling for more granular control
Many advertisers customize their ad content to align with their business hours or special events like sales and promotions. With enhanced campaigns, you can now schedule the specific dates, days of the week, or times of day for your call extensions and sitelinks, at either the ad group or campaign levels. So instead of having to manually turn ads on or off to run specific extensions, you can now schedule them ahead of time.

Example: A multi-national sporting goods business has a website and physical stores in 5 major cities. With enhanced campaigns, Mary, their online marketing manager, can align her AdWords schedule with the operations of the business. Mary runs call extensions between 10am and 6pm when her stores are staffed. After 6pm, she schedules ads to point to the website instead of the call extension. For weekend sales and promotions, she can schedule sitelinks pointing customers directly to her “Sale” page. Scheduling enables sitelinks to appear exactly at the times that Mary sets (e.g., 12 midnight on Saturday) instead of having to manually turn them on at that time.

Advanced reporting for sitelinks and new conversion types
Many advertisers drive leads or conduct business over the phone, so they value phone calls as much as, or more than, clicks to their website. To give you greater visibility into the full value of your ad spend, AdWords reports now count phone calls as conversions, making it easier to compare calls alongside more traditional conversion types like online sales. For example, you can now specify that calls longer than 60 seconds count as conversions.

We’ve also made reporting for individual sitelinks more precise and actionable. You can now manage and track sitelinks individually to ensure that each one drives the right ROI. You can also take advantage of per-link approvals so if one link is disapproved, your other links can still run.

Continuing the above example: Mary uses the new detailed per-link reports to manage individual sitelinks. Below, you can see that the “Swimming” sitelink only got 16 clicks, while the other sitelinks for the sporting goods store got 100+ clicks each. With this precise data, Mary made the informed decision to replace the “Swimming” sitelink with another one, like “Soccer.”

Mary further segments her data with the "This Extension vs. Other” feature. Here, you can see that two clicks occurred specifically on the “Running” sitelink while 137 clicks occurred on the other parts of the sitelink, like the headline.

Feedback
We really value your feedback to help us make AdWords even better. In fact, many of the new features that we described today are a result of your ideas and suggestions. Please continue to share your thoughts using this form so we can continue to improve the product.

Posted by Scott Silver, Senior Director, Ads Engineering

AdWords Enhanced Campaigns 202: sitelinks, and call extensions

This Thursday, please join us as we continue our enhanced campaigns webinar series.  In Enhanced Campaigns 202, you will learn about how sitelinks, and call extensions have been improved with enhanced campaigns to work in a multi-device world.

You can read up on enhanced campaigns and keep up with future announcements on the Inside AdWords blog.

Posted by Mark Martel, the Google Ads team

Enhanced campaigns: New bidding tools and mobile bid adjustments

Today, people are constantly connected and searching from all kinds of devices. Advertisers are looking for ways to reach people with ads that are relevant to their context, like their location, the time of day and the device they are using. With an enhanced campaign, you can easily vary your bids across devices, locations, and time of day – all within a single campaign.

Example: A multichannel retailer wants to reach people close to their stores searching for “party supplies.” Using bid adjustments, with three simple entries, they can bid 50% higher for people searching up to a mile away, 20% lower for searches on weekdays, and 25% higher for searches on smartphones.

In this post and a Learn with Google webinar this Thursday, February 21st, at 10am PST (sign-up here), we’ll look more closely at the new bidding tools and mobile bid adjustments. This Thursday’s webinar will also dive deeper into some of the improvements with mobile ads.

Bid adjustments
With an enhanced campaign, you start by setting default bids that reach all devices. You can then set bid adjustments to increase or decrease your bids for mobile devices and different contexts – like location and time of day. Setting higher bids when and where you’re more likely to satisfy a customer’s intent can boost your ad’s visibility and potentially lead to more visits and sales. Setting lower bids for contexts where your lead quality or average order value is lower can improve your ROI, although you may see fewer visits and lower total sales.

Bidding for devices with larger screens, like desktops, laptops and tablets, is grouped together in enhanced campaigns. We and others in the industry see that users’ search behavior on these larger devices is very similar, and likewise, overall advertiser performance is very similar across these devices.

Bid adjustments combine using multiplication. If you set multiple location-based bid adjustments, only the most specific adjustment will apply.

Continuing the example above: The retailer’s max CPC bid for the keyword [party supplies] is $1. When someone searches for “party supplies” on a smartphone within a mile radius from the store on Wednesday, then the location, time, and mobile bid adjustments set will apply. So this retailer’s CPC bid for this particular search would be adjusted to $1.50 ($1 x (100% + 50%) x (100% - 20%) x (100% + 25%) = $1.50).

The AdWords interface provides a calculator to show you how multiple bid adjustments might combine to affect your bids.

(click image to expand)

Valuing mobile and setting a mobile bid adjustment
People can take a wide range of actions on smartphones. Beyond purchasing directly from your mobile site, customers might call your business, click on driving directions to visit a store, download an app, or even convert on another device later. But traditional online conversion reporting may not show the full consumer journey across devices and can therefore lead to undervaluing mobile. Savvy marketers are looking deeper to consider the full value that mobile brings to their business. Check out how Radio Shack, a large multi-channel consumer electronics retailer, approaches their mobile bidding and measurement strategy here as an example.

With an enhanced campaign, you can choose a mobile bid adjustment to influence your ad position, clicks and cost on mobile devices. For a bit of perspective, here are a few of examples of how advertisers set their mobile bids as a percentage of desktop over the course of the last several months (actual CPCs may differ).

• On average, advertisers in the Australian retail sector set mobile bids to 103% of desktop.
  
• On average, advertisers in the US real estate sector set mobile bids to 91% of desktop.
  
• On average, advertisers in the Canadian travel sector set mobile bids to 88% of desktop.
  

With each campaign you upgrade to an enhanced campaign, you’ll see the estimated change in impressions, clicks and cost depending on your selected mobile bid adjustment. The suggested bid adjustment shows you how similar advertisers bid on mobile compared to other devices.

(click image to expand)

Experienced search marketers know that bids are one of many factors that influence overall campaign performance, along with keywords, ads, extensions, and landing pages. So after setting a mobile bid adjustment, periodically measure your results and make changes as needed to better meet your campaign goals.

Feedback
We want you to succeed with AdWords, so we’re very interested in hearing your feedback. As you begin using enhanced campaigns, please share your thoughts using this form so we can continue to improve the product.

Posted by Surojit Chatterjee, Group Product Manager

Learn more about enhanced campaigns

Last week we announced enhanced campaigns, which let you more easily adjust your ads and bids depending on your customers’ location, device, and time of day - all within a single campaign.

We’ll be hosting several Learn with Google webinars about enhanced campaigns over the next few weeks. This Thursday, February 14 at 10am PST, Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President of Engineering, and Jason Spero, Global Sales Director, will provide an overview of enhanced campaigns and Q&A. Please sign up here to attend.

Also look for more information and details about enhanced campaigns over the next few weeks here on our blog.

Posted by Mark Martel, the Google Ads team

Enhancing AdWords for a constantly connected world

Today we’re upgrading AdWords, by rolling out enhanced campaigns. This is a first step to help you more simply and smartly manage your ad campaigns in today’s multi-device world.

Why enhanced campaigns?
People are constantly connected and moving from one device to another to communicate, shop and stay entertained. In fact, a recent study of multi-device consumers found that 90% move sequentially between several screens to accomplish a task. There’s also a proliferation of new devices — PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, hybrid devices, mini-tablets, televisions, and more. And there are many more digital screens and devices to come, with the lines between them continuing to blur. For example, as devices converge, consumer behaviors on tablets and desktops are becoming very similar.

This creates great opportunities for businesses, but can also make marketing more complex and time-consuming. For example, a pizza restaurant probably wants to show one ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 1pm on their PC at work (perhaps a link to an online order form or menu), and a different ad to someone searching for “pizza” at 8pm on a smartphone a half-mile from the restaurant (perhaps a click-to-call phone number and restaurant locator). 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.

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. 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.



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 — 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.
   

Upgrading to enhanced campaigns
Enhanced campaigns will roll out to advertisers as an option over the next few weeks, and we plan to upgrade all campaigns in mid-2013.

Enhanced campaigns are designed to help you succeed in a multi-screen world, but we know that transitioning may involve some initial changes. Here are some resources to help you:

• Website
  
• Help Center
  
• Upgrade videos and guides
  
• AdWords Community forum
  

Over the coming weeks we’ll dive into the new features with tips and best practices on the Inside AdWords blog and on our Google+ page. We’d love your feedback.

Posted by Sridhar Ramaswamy, Senior Vice President of Engineering