Workarounds To Make Enhanced Campaigns More Flexible

Last week at SMX West, I was on the “SEM Best Practices Debate” panel. Several of the topics we debated were related to Enhanced Campaigns, clearly something on the minds of search marketers these days. This month, I’ll recap a few take-aways from the event and share some ideas for workarounds and automation that may […]

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Last week at SMX West, I was on the “SEM Best Practices Debate” panel. Several of the topics we debated were related to Enhanced Campaigns, clearly something on the minds of search marketers these days. This month, I’ll recap a few take-aways from the event and share some ideas for workarounds and automation that may make your transition to Enhanced Campaigns a bit easier.

Does It Make Sense To Target Tablets & Desktops In The Same Campaign?

This debate topic was a tongue-in-cheek jab at Enhanced Campaigns which make the answer largely irrelevant since splitting out desktops and tablets into separate campaigns is no longer possible. Google has said that tablets and desktops should be treated the same. But what did the panelists have to say?

The majority of the panel agreed that combining tablets and desktops is not completely crazy because while there still is a clear distinction between the devices, it is shrinking by the day.

Case in point: all the people in the session were using new PCs running Windows 8 that can be physically reconfigured into either a laptop or a tablet. In this case, it’s the same device, and the main difference is in how the screen is used. If the user was using it as a tablet to do research and then wanted to convert it to a laptop to make a purchase, all they would need to do is flip the screen.

This raised the point that rather than targeting tablets and desktops where the experience may be converging, it might make more sense to be able to target based on the screen size of the device. We can all dream that this form of segmentation will come to AdWords, right?

In my own experience, I have seen the results on tablets vary wildly; sometimes they outperform the desktop and sometimes they underperform. So, while I’d rather still be able to set separate bids for tablets, I do agree that having the same ads will not necessarily make my results worse.

Workarounds For Targeting Tablet Devices In Enhanced Campaigns

It may still be desirable to show a different landing page to tablet users, which luckily doesn’t require making a separate ad for tablets. Instead, detect tablet devices on your landing page and then customize the experience by suggesting the user download your app or use a tablet-optimized version of your site.

One of the easiest ways to determine whether someone who clicked an ad was using a desktop, tablet or mobile is to use the {device} ValueTrack parameter. You can append this to your destination URL, and then Google will replace it with either ‘m’ for mobile, ‘t’ for tablet, or ‘c’ for computer. Based on that, you can vary up the content of your landing page.

ValueTrack To Identify Mobile Visitors

Some ValueTrack parameters as described in the AdWords Help Center

And, if you’re concerned like me that bids should take the device type into consideration, you can still use Google’s Conversion Optimizer or Enhanced CPC, which will raise and lower bids automatically based on the expected likelihood of a conversion considering the particular details of the click, including: time, location, other words in the query, and device. Even if you use your own bid management technology, Enhanced CPC can be used as a layer on top of that.

How Significant Is The Loss Of Mobile Device & Carrier Targeting?

While Enhanced Campaigns still allow advertisers to use a different ad text and landing page when their ads appear on mobile phones, the ability to target to specific devices (e.g., iPhone vs. Nexus 4) and to target different carriers (e.g., AT&T vs. T-Mobile) is now completely gone.

Considering that Google’s own Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik’s, says, “All data in aggregate is ‘crap’,” to make the point that online marketing success is highly dependent on smart segmentation that leads to actionable insights, it’s a shame that these layers of segmentation have been taken away from advertisers.

Device and carrier targeting were reasonable substitutes for demographic targeting, something not offered for AdWords search ads. For example, you could venture that iPhone users are more likely early adopters than BlackBerry users, and AT&T subscribers probably have higher incomes than Boost subscribers. I once met a locksmith who told me he had tremendous success targeting ads for the keyword ‘lost keys’ to iPhones because those users were more likely to pay his higher fee for rush service.

Workaround For Device Targeting

It’s not a complete solution, but just like in the tablet example, it’s possible to use ValueTrack to at least change up your landing pages based on the device. In this case, use the {devicemodel} parameter in your destination URL so that Google will pass the type of device on to your website. For example, they would replace {devicemodel} with “Apple+iPhone.”

Can We Run Successful Campaigns With A Single Bid Multiplier For All Ads In A Campaign?

Unfortunately, our panel ran out of time and this wasn’t discussed, but I have no doubt everyone would have argued that one bid multiplier is simply not enough for sophisticated advertisers. I would have argued that this is inadequate control because a campaign can contain keywords associated with different stages of the conversion funnel, and each stage may have different results.

Here’s an example: I find myself more inclined to do early research for a purchase on my mobile phone, but use my laptop when I’m ready to buy. For an advertiser targeting me, upper funnel keywords would be more valuable on mobile devices than lower funnel keywords. Of course, if your business is local in nature, it may be the exact opposite. You may value a search more from someone showrooming on their mobile phone than someone just starting their research on their home computer.

But, regardless of what applies to your business, my argument is that there is a wide spectrum of intents behind different keywords, and it would be better to allow advertisers to set multiple mobile bid multipliers within campaigns.

Workaround For Setting Multiple Mobile Bid Multipliers

I’ve heard two solutions for setting more granular mobile bids using Enhanced Campaigns.

Enhanced Campaigns Bid Strategies

Two possible ways to structure Enhanced Campaigns to preserve more granular mobile bids.

Solution 1: Duplicate Campaigns

The first workaround is to create 2 campaigns that contain all keywords, one called ‘Mobile,’ the other, ‘Desktop.’ By setting all bids in the ‘Mobile’ campaign lower, the ‘Desktop’ campaign’s higher bids should cause it to serve all the ads for desktops and tablets.

Then, by setting the mobile multiplier of the ‘Desktop’ campaign to -100%, all mobile ads will be served by the ‘Mobile’ campaign. Now, you can vary bids for every keyword in the mobile campaign to determine mobile bids. You can use a mobile bid multiplier in this campaign if you need mobile bids to sometimes exceed desktop bids.

The challenge with this setup is that you need to make sure that your base bids in the ‘Mobile’ campaign always stay lower than the bids in the ‘Desktop’ campaign.

Solution 2: Tiered Campaigns

In the second workaround, you create several campaigns with different mobile bid multipliers, and then assign keywords to the campaign whose bid multiplier most closely matches your needs. I prefer this method because it’s a little simpler to maintain in the long run, if you’re okay assuming that conversion rate differences between desktop and mobile will remain relatively consistent for the same keywords.

To put this into practice, download your entire keyword list and compare the current desktop bid to the mobile bid. You’ll probably find that you can now group the keywords into a handful of ‘buckets,’ e.g., 0 to 20% lower mobile bid, 20 to 30% lower mobile bid, and 30 to 60% lower mobile bid. Based on these buckets, create campaigns with the desired mobile multiplier, e.g., -20%, -30% and -60%. Then, move the keywords to the correct new campaigns.

Now, when you change the bid for a keyword, you don’t need to worry about accidentally shifting impressions to a parallel campaign where the same keyword has a higher bid and ad rank.

This process can be tedious, but as I’ve explained in my previous two posts, AdWords Scripts can come to the rescue to automate this task.

Use Big Data To Improve Your Account By Setting Location Bid Multipliers

While we’ve lost segmentation for tablets, mobile devices and carriers, there is good news, too, in that we’ve gained a simplification in how we can segment for locations.

In the SMX session on Big Data, Kevin Lee gave the example that location is a big data signal that can be used to set better bids. In the past, that would have required creating separate campaigns for every region, but now, it can be done with a location bid multiplier in the settings of Enhanced Campaigns.

Setting these location multipliers through the AdWords interface is fine if you only have a few campaigns, but when you have hundreds, consider using the AdWords Editor, where the just released version 10 now supports copy-and-paste of location bid multipliers between campaigns.

Automate Merging Campaigns

Google makes it sound very easy to merge campaigns in their documentation for switching to Enhanced Campaigns. But, if you’ve followed their previous recommended best practice for mobile ads, which was to maintain a separate campaign for mobile ads so that you could set separate bids, run different ad texts and use landing pages designed specifically for mobile devices, your campaigns may no longer look like duplicates, and you may find yourself facing a long slough to get the upgrade done.

If your mobile campaign is no longer a simple copy of the structure of your desktop campaign merging is not a simple matter of combining ad groups with the same name, but it’s now a matter of figuring out which ad groups are similar and could be merged together.

This is another instance where AdWords Scripts can really help with automating a tedious task. Let’s assume for a moment that you will merge everything from a campaign called ‘Mobile’ into a campaign called ‘Desktop.’

You could write a script that goes through every keyword in ‘Mobile’ and finds the equivalent ad group in ‘Desktop’ by looking for the ad group name that contains the keyword. It could then write the ad text from ‘Mobile’ and the ad group name from ‘Desktop’ to a spreadsheet, giving you the basis for a spreadsheet you could upload through AdWords Editor to move all your ad texts to the right location.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Frederick Vallaeys
Contributor
Frederick (“Fred”) Vallaeys was one of the first 500 employees at Google where he spent 10 years building Google Ads and teaching advertisers how to get the most out of it as the first Google AdWords Evangelist. Today he is the Cofounder and CEO of Optmyzr, a PPC management SaaS company focused on making search, shopping, and display ads easier to manage with rules, scripts, reports, audits, and more. He is a frequent guest speaker at events where he inspires organizations to be more innovative and use AI and Automation Layering to become better marketers. His latest book, Unlevel the Playing Field, follows his best-seller, Digital Marketing in an AI World.

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