The main focus of every business is to increase their profits and Google is not an exception to this and they have just proved this statement correct by introducing Enhanced campaigns.
The reason I say this is; if you look at the features offered in Enhanced Campaign, there is hardly anything for the advertiser/account manager that is beneficial. On the other hand there are a lot of things that are beneficial to Google.
First and foremost, with EC they would save a lot of bandwidth of managing millions of keywords in each account. Creating campaigns by devices and by location has been a general practice or a strategy of every search marketer/advertiser. With EC, there will no longer be such duplication. No need to create duplicate campaign by Geo location, this would mean less keyword to manage and Google can save lots of money on their server space.
What would this mean to advertiser? Managing one campaign in place of 3 campaigns would mean less work/less hassle? Let’s review some of the features one by one:
Removal of Device Targeting
Google - With the removal of device targeting, targeting Tablet devices is now default, which would mean additional revenue to Google, regardless of the fact that the traffic is beneficial to advertiser or not.
Advertiser – Not every advertiser would be willing to target tablet devices, as the same may not be beneficial to many advertisers:
· If the advertiser website is not optimized for tablet device like a flash website, the priority would be to revamp their website for tablet device. An additional cost to advertisers.
· Websites with long lead application form/checkout process, calls for rethinking their website design
· Advertisers opted for tablet devices, had a control over the traffic with budget caps and bid adjustment, now desktop bids are applicable for tablet traffic and no budget caps.
Thank fully the option opting out of mobile devices is available in EC by bid modifier of -100%. If not it would have been mandatory for the advertisers to have a website compatible to mobile devices. However going forward Mobile only campaign cannot be created and it will be part of desktop campaign and will have to be managed by bid modifier feature. This may not give the advertiser with greatest of control over the budget split between desktop and mobile devices however can still set the tone in the right direction with correct bid optimization.
Device targeting is still available for Display campaigns, which means that, if you are already not running them in separate campaign (which definitely is the best practice) then they will have to be separated to take advantage of devices features in display campaign.
Changes to location targeting
Creating campaign specific to each geographic location has been the best practice so far, however going forward a single campaign can be created targeted to multiple locations with location specific bid adjustment. This doesn’t entitle any budget cap at location level, if you wish to have control over budget spent on each location it is still recommended to have separate campaign for each location.
Changes to ad extensions
EC offers a feature of adding extensions at ad group level, quite an interesting feature as this would help compare performance of extensions of different ad group with in a campaign. My take on this is, if all the ad groups are tightly themed to a campaign, then how different extensions could you test at each ad group level? Only benefit that I can see from this feature is that, we can compare clicks on sitelinks within different ad groups. If we are seeing more clicks on sitelinks from any ad group that would mean visitors are more attracted towards site link then ad, so would call for revamp of the ad copy.
Bid Optimization
With the introduction of bud multiplier option and by bringing mobile devices under a single campaign, it is a bigger challenge if you are currently managing bids using 3rd party bidding tools. As we switch to EC we may have to start using AdWords bid multiplier option till we have a fix in place from the third party tools. Have you ever used conversion optimizer before? No? Isn’t this a nice way to say, you should only use AdWords?
To summarize it all, I believe it is more of a business oriented strategy from Google and less of an additional feature that is beneficial to end user. EC is new to everyone and as we would start working on this more and more, we will have clear picture of its pros and cons.
