Enhanced Campaigns Pitfalls – 2 Bid Adjustment Settings to Look Out For [Guest Post]
Now that the deadline for upgrading your Google Adwords account to Enhanced Campaigns has passed, Matt Gilbert from indium online has written us this great post about 2 of the important bid adjustment settings to look out for.
Mobile-Only Campaigns are no longer an option
A major part of the Google Adwords Enhanced Campaign upgrade was the ability to merge mobile and desktop campaigns into one shared campaign giving the ability to modify mobile bids on those campaigns.
But there are times when you want a separate mobile campaign. If you’ve done your homework on your device performance reports you may already know that some of your campaigns perform better with mobile users. And with mobile search behaviour being different from desktop you may just want to tailor keyword strategy specifically at the mobile searcher.
Account management has definitely been streamlined by having desktop and mobile bundled together. But with all the wonderful array of bid modifiers now available it is not possible to turn desktop off, or put another way, to have a mobile only campaign. The nearest you can get is to choose a low default bid – to use on desktop, and then apply a very large adjustment up for mobile. It’s not pretty and makes every simple decision one that requires a bit of maths.
Ad Scheduling, just got a bit dangerous.
Another potentially sticky side effect of the bidding options introduced is the danger of scheduling your ads out of existence. The visual pre upgrade interface made it clear exactly when your ads were showing and more importantly when they weren’t. Gone now is this visual cue and in its place a list based control.
If you have a lot of periodic adjustments, setting bid modifiers can be a time consuming process that needs to be even more carefully set up than before. The real danger to be wary of is that as soon as you add one adjustment for a campaign, you will need to fill in a full schedule for the rest of the week or risk your ads not showing for any period other than the one you’ve just added. By turning your ads on for Thursday, you may be inadvertently telling Adwords you want your Ads turned off for the rest of the week.
This month indium online are hosting Awesome Adwords August – a month long programme of information about the latest Adwords changes and how to make the most of them in your business.
Including a Seminar Series hosted by Chloë Thomas author of the eCommerce MasterPlan
And the chance to get a free review of your Adwords account